Today’s reality in the operating room

As of 2026, static cold storage (SCS) remains the predominant standard method of donor organ preservation worldwide. This involves flushing the donor organ with a specialized cold preservation solution (typically at 4°C, such as University of Wisconsin solution or histidine-tryptophan-ketoglutarate) to remove blood and reduce metabolic activity, then storing it in a sterile triple bag or container packed with ice in a cooler for transport. This simple, cost-effective, and portable technique slows cellular metabolism and minimizes ischemic damage, allowing preservation times of 4-6 hours for hearts, 6-8 hours for lungs, 12-24 hours for kidneys, and up to 12-15 hours for livers, depending on the organ. While effective for standard donors, SCS has limitations, such as increased risk of graft dysfunction with extended times or marginal organs, leading to higher discard rates. So what are the companies whose products address that?

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1. TransMedics

TransMedics is a frontrunner in normothermic machine perfusion (NMP), with their Organ Care System (OCS) platform approved for heart, lung, and liver transplants in the U.S. The OCS is a portable “box” that keeps organs functioning ex vivo by circulating warm, nutrient-rich, oxygenated blood or a blood-based solution through them, essentially replicating the body’s conditions. This contrasts with hypothermic methods by keeping the organ metabolically active rather than slowing metabolism, which enables therapeutic interventions (e.g., adjusting electrolytes or administering medications) and functional evaluation during preservation. As of 2026, the OCS is FDA-approved for both donation after brain death (DBD) and donation after circulatory death (DCD) indications across heart, lung, and liver transplants in the U.S., and it’s CE-marked in Europe. Clinical benefits include lower rates of early allograft dysfunction (EAD, e.g., an 13% reduction compared to cold storage for livers), improved graft survival, and expanded use of marginal donor organs. Moreover, the comapny has their own aircraft fleet to further ease the supply chain for transplantation. I was also very happy to see that they have an extensive body of peer reviewed publications on the effect of their system on organs, as well as economic impact on the “industry”, for the lack of better word.

• How it works: The OCS is a fully portable, multi-organ system that uses normothermic (body-temperature, approximately 34-37°C) perfusion to mimic the human body’s environment, perfusing organs with warm, oxygenated, nutrient-enriched donor-compatible blood (often collected from the donor or supplemented). This contrasts with hypothermic methods by keeping the organ metabolically active rather than slowing metabolism, which enables therapeutic interventions (e.g., adjusting electrolytes or administering medications) and functional evaluation during preservation. As of 2026, the OCS is FDA-approved for both donation after brain death (DBD) and donation after circulatory death (DCD) indications across heart, lung, and liver transplants in the U.S., and it’s CE-marked in Europe. Clinical benefits include lower rates of early allograft dysfunction (EAD, e.g., an 18% reduction compared to cold storage for livers), improved graft survival, and expanded use of marginal donor organs.

  • OCS Heart: The system perfuses the donor heart with warm, oxygenated blood via the aorta, allowing it to continue beating rhythmically as it would in vivo. This is achieved through a sterile perfusion module that houses the organ, circulates blood, and maintains homeostasis (e.g., pH, oxygenation). Real-time monitoring includes ECG waveforms, aortic pressure, coronary flow, and lactate levels to assess viability and detect issues like arrhythmias or ischemia. Preservation times surpass the 4-6 hours typical of cold storage, enabling cross-country or international transport.

  • OSC Lung: The device combines perfusion with mechanical ventilation: lungs are inflated/deflated cyclically while perfused with warm blood through the pulmonary artery. This allows the lungs to “breathe” and exchange gases, improving condition by recruiting alveoli and clearing secretions if needed. Diagnostics focus on gas exchange metrics (e.g., PaO2/FiO2 ratio), bronchoscopy access for evaluation, and parameters like pulmonary vascular resistance. It supports extended preservation and is approved for both standard and expanded-criteria lungs, reducing primary graft dysfunction risks.

  • OSC Liver: The liver is perfused via the hepatic artery and portal vein with warm blood, sustaining metabolic functions such as bile production, glucose regulation, and lactate clearance. The system includes automated controls for flow rates, pressure, and temperature, with a bile collection reservoir for quantitative assessment. Monitoring tracks hemodynamic parameters (e.g., portal vein flow), biomarkers (e.g., ALT/AST enzymes), and bile output to evaluate graft quality and predict post-transplant performance. Viable times are extended, minimizing reperfusion injury and supporting DCD/DBD livers that might otherwise be discarded.

Financials and Market Status: As a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: TMDX), TransMedics boasts a market capitalization of approximately $4.4 billion as of early March 2026, with its stock price around $135, reflecting a 104% increase over the past year despite volatility. For 2025, the company reported full-year revenue of $605.5 million (up 37% YoY) and net income of $190.3 million, turning profitable at scale. Fourth-quarter 2025 revenue reached $160.8 million (32% YoY growth), with optimistic 2026 guidance emphasizing strategic initiatives for continued expansion. Trading at 56 times forward earnings, it’s viewed as “expensive” but promising, with analyst fair value estimates ranging from $144 to $240 per share, underscoring its leadership in reinventing transplant logistics amid high demand.

2. XVIVO Perfusion

XVIVO, a Swedish company, specializes in ex-vivo organ perfusion across multiple organs, with a portfolio including hypothermic, normothermic, and sub-normothermic options. Their PERFADEX Plus static cold-storage lung preservation solution is used in over 90% of lung transplant clinics worldwide, emphasizing oxygenated perfusion to maintain cellular health.

How it works:

• Kidney Assist Transport: A portable hypothermic pulsatile perfusion device that pumps cold, oxygenated solution through the kidney’s vessels for up to 24 hours, reducing ischemia damage.

• Liver Assist: Flexible protocols for hypothermic oxygenated perfusion (HOPE/DHOPE) or normothermic perfusion, circulating fluids to support metabolism and assess viability.

• XPS (Ex-Vivo Lung Perfusion): An integrated platform that perfuses and ventilates lungs with oxygenated solution, allowing functional testing like gas exchange.

Key features: Customizable temperatures, real-time monitoring, and compatibility with their PERFADEX Plus solution for lung preservation. This tech extends preservation, enables organ evaluation, and boosts utilization rates.

Financials and Market Status: Publicly listed on Nasdaq Stockholm (XVIVO.ST), XVIVO Perfusion has a market capitalization of around $600 million as of March 2026, with its stock trading at approximately $19.82. Trailing twelve-month revenue stands at 812 million SEK (about $77 million USD), with gross profit of 599 million SEK and EBITDA of 138 million SEK, though quarterly revenue growth dipped slightly by 0.6% YoY recently. The company targets EBIT over 20% and EBITDA over 30% by 2027, focusing on profitable growth in its dominant lung transplant segment amid a stable Nordic market position

3. OrganOx

OrganOx focuses on liver preservation with their metra system, a fully automated NMP device that’s FDA-approved and used globally. It’s designed to keep livers viable for extended periods under near-physiological conditions.

How it works: The metra perfuses the liver with oxygenated blood at body temperature, maintaining functions like bile production and glucose metabolism. It automates fluid circulation, temperature control, and monitoring, preserving organs for up to 24 hours (12 in some regions).

Key features: Viability testing during perfusion, procedural optimization, and a user-friendly interface. This allows clinicians to assess organ quality in real-time, reducing uncertainty.

Financials and Market Status: Acquired by japanese Terumo Corporation in August 2025 for a reported $1.5 billion valuation, OrganOx is now integrated into a larger medtech ecosystem, marking one of the UK’s largest medtech exits. Prior to acquisition, it raised $45.4 million across nine funding rounds, with the latest Series D in February 2025. Post-acquisition, Terumo projects OrganOx to contribute about 9 billion JPY (roughly $60 million USD) in revenue for the five-month period from November 2025 to March 2026. As a subsidiary, it benefits from Terumo’s resources, strengthening its market position in liver perfusion amid growing demand for normothermic technologies

4. Paragonix Technologies

Paragonix offers advanced hypothermic oxygenated preservation and transport systems for heart, liver, lung, and kidney, bridging the gap between static cold storage and full perfusion. Acquired by Getinge in 2024, their devices emphasize controlled cooling with monitoring.

How it works: Systems like SherpaPak (heart), LIVERguard (liver), and BAROguard use hypothermic oxygenated technology to maintain a stable cold environment (without freezing) while circulating minimal fluids for oxygenation. Real-time tracking via the Paragonix App monitors temperature, location, and pressure.

Key features: 24/7 clinical support, integration with GUARDIAN registries for data-driven insights, and extended transport times over traditional ice boxes.

Financials and Market Status: Acquired by Getinge in September 2024 for $477 million, Paragonix was previously private and had raised $39.3 million in funding, including a $24 million Series B in 2023. Specific revenue figures are not publicly disclosed post-acquisition, but as part of Getinge (market cap ~$5 billion), it contributes to the parent’s cardiovascular and life sciences segments. Market-wise, the acquisition enhances Paragonix’s global reach, positioning it as a key player in hypothermic transport amid investor interest in organ preservation innovations.

5. Bridge to Life

Bridge to Life provides hypothermic oxygenated perfusion solutions, with the VitaSmart system as their flagship for liver preservation. They’re known for simplicity and FDA-cleared innovations in HOPE technology. It’s the first FDA-cleared HOPE device in the U.S.

How it works: VitaSmart pumps cold, oxygenated solution through the organ’s vessels, maintaining viability during transport and storage. It’s automated for ease, focusing on nutritional perfusion to prevent reperfusion injury.

Key features: Portable design, compatibility with their Belzer UW solutions, and global support for procurement.

Finantials: As a private company, Bridge to Life does not disclose detailed financials publicly. It has a history of strategic growth through acquisitions, including Organ Recovery Systems in 2019, and is backed by experienced leadership with a track record in medtech financings exceeding $1 billion aggregate. Market-wise, it holds a strong position in organ preservation solutions, focusing on improving transplant success in a growing sector, though specific revenue or valuation data remains proprietary.

6. Organ Recovery Systems

A pioneer in hypothermic machine perfusion, Organ Recovery Systems’ LifePort series is trusted for kidney and liver, with over 275,000 kidneys preserved since 2003.

How it works: LifePort Kidney/Liver Transporters pump a cold physiologic solution through the organ in a sterile, sealed environment, with pulsatile flow for kidneys and precision control for livers (hepatic artery/portal vein). It combines dynamic perfusion with backup static storage.

Key features: Portable for air/ground travel, encrypted data transmission, intuitive app with multilingual training, and visual flow confirmation.

Impact: Boosts 1-3 year graft survival, enables daytime scheduling, and supports high-volume centers (e.g., 400-500 perfusions/year). Backed by 60+ studies and 10-year data.

Financials and Market Status: Operating as a subsidiary of Bridge to Life since its 2019 acquisition, Organ Recovery Systems is private with no public financial disclosures. Prior to the merger, it raised $26.9 million in funding and was profitable. Its market status benefits from integration with Bridge to Life, maintaining a solid foothold in kidney and liver perfusion within the broader organ recovery ecosystem, contributing to industry growth projected at 12-14% CAGR.

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How does this relate to organ banking by vitrification?

Machine perfusion is already teaching the field how to cannulate organs reproducibly, control vascular resistance and flow, monitor injury in real time, and build the transport-grade infrastructure needed to keep a graft under continuous supervision outside the body. Those capabilities matter directly for vitrification, because it requires uniform CPA loading and washout through the native vasculature, minimization of edema and endothelial injury, tight control of thermal gradients, and reliable functional readouts before and after rewarming. A major bottleneck is that the concentrated cryoprotectant solutions needed for vitrification (as of 2026) become highly viscous at the low temperatures preferred for toxicity reduction, making perfusion progressively more difficult exactly where gentler loading would otherwise be desirable. Higher viscosity increases vascular resistance, worsens flow heterogeneity, limits penetration into the microvasculature, and raises the risk of underperfused regions that later form ice or suffer solute injury. In that sense, today’s perfusion platforms could be creating the operational backbone for CPA loading and unloading perfusion circuits, disposables, sensors, logistics networks, trained recovery teams, and outcome-based validation frameworks.

What do you think? Did I miss any companies? Have you heard of any of these companies before?

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To move the needle on organ banking, and eventual whole organism POC, we must prioritize functional validation: the proof that a biological system doesn’t just look “fine,” but can still perform its job. Cryopreservation has reached the point where structural validation is no longer an adequate metric of progress; functional performance must be the new gold standard.

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Structural vs. Functional

Structural validation tells us the “parts” are there. Functional validation tells us the “machine” still runs. In neurobiology, for instance, a vitrified and rewarmed slice of the hippocampus might show intact synaptic densities under a microscope. However, without electrophysiological testing such as Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) protocols, we cannot claim the circuit is “preserved.” If the neurons cannot fire or maintain a resting membrane potential, we haven’t preserved a brain; we’ve preserved a very complex sculpture.

To check the effectiveness of their protocols (That surprisingly often still operate by manipulating the ratios of the 4 horseman: DMSO, EG, PG and sucrose/trehalose), most groups default to immunofluorescence, cell counts, or Western blots because they are cheap, fast, and operationally simple. A full round of IF or a Western blot costs well under $50–$150 per sample in consumables, requires only a microscope or a gel rig that every lab already owns, and can be completed within a day. These assays scale easily and fit into the workflow of junior technicians.

Functional assays, in contrast, are not prohibitively expensive, but they do require different infrastructure, expertise, and time. Of course, they are tissue-specific, but some examples include:

• Enzyme activity assays:
  Many kits run $3–20 per reaction;
  even kinetic assays on plate readers cost less than an antibody.

• Live-cell imaging of calcium flux, membrane potential, or synaptic activity:
  Dyes are $5–10 per sample,
  time on a decent confocal ~$20–80/hr internal recharge rate.

Out of assays that require a one time big investment but then serve for years:

• Mitochondrial respiration (Seahorse XF):
  Approx. $45–70 per well for sensor cartridges + plates;
  initial instrument cost $60–130k, so I get that some labs might not have it
  runtime ~2–3 hours.
  Once the instrument exists, per-sample costs are comparable to a good antibody.

• Electrophysiology (patch-clamp, MEA):
  Big up-front cost ($40–150k),
  but per-sample consumables are low (~$5–15).
  The true cost is expertise and labor, not materials.

• Flow cytometry (functional reporter dyes):
  Per-sample consumables $2–6 per sample for live-cell functional dyes (calcium flux, ROS, mitochondrial potential, apoptosis), plus basic tubes and buffers.
  The initial instrument cost is high ($80–350k, depending on configuration), so not every lab owns one directly, but almost all institutions have a shared core facility.

These were for cells. For organs it goes without saying that the ultimate success test is transplantation.

In other words, the barrier is not money, it’s culture and convenience (and the specialized trainee to run eg patch clamping, but that is case-specific)
For most experiments, running a functional readout costs:

• 2–3× more per sample than a basic Western blot,

• but 10× more information about whether the cell actually works.

The difference between “cheap” and “functional” is typically a few dozen dollars per sample, not thousands (assuming the lab has access to equipment (or collaborators)). Cryopreservation research has historically chosen structural assays because they’re accessible and familiar, not because functional assays are financially out of reach.

Do you have any other '“cheap and easy but useful” functional assay examples?

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Why Validation Matters On Many Levels

True functional validation must happen across every layer of biological organization:

• Cellular Level: Cellular “viability” assays like Trypan Blue exclusion, Calcein-AM or DAPI staining set an exceptionally low bar. They report membrane integrity or general reductive activity, but say little about whether the cell can perform the function it is biologically designed for (and are so easy to misinterpret depending on what resolution you set, or which counting paramters you use). Across cell types, cryopreservation routinely preserves morphology and markers while degrading performance. Cardiomyocytes may remain viable yet lose contractility or exhibit abnormal excitation–contraction coupling. Immune cells frequently maintain surface markers and transcriptomes but show reduced proliferation, cytokine release, phagocytosis, migration, or cytotoxicity. Neural cells can look morphologically intact yet lose calcium synchrony, axonal transport efficiency, neurotransmission fidelity, or spontaneous electrophysiological activity.

  The implication is straightforward: meaningful post-thaw assessment must evaluate contractility, metabolic flux, chemotaxis, electrophysiology, enzyme kinetics, or calcium signaling, not simply membrane integrity or marker expression.

• Organ Level: At the organ scale, functional validation is non-negotiable because structure and physiology frequently diverge in meaningful ways after cryopreservation or traditional preservation methods. Simply observing intact vasculature or acceptable histology does not guarantee an organ will perform its biological functions once rewarmed or reperfused.

  For instance, normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) has emerged clinically because static cold storage alone often fails to sustain metabolic and functional integrity in donor organs. NMP enables ongoing metabolism and direct functional evaluation including oxygen consumption, lactate clearance, bile production, and urine output during ex vivo perfusion, and these metrics correlate more strongly with graft viability than histology alone. This phenomenon has been repeatedly documented across organs such as liver and kidney grafts subjected to NMP prior to transplantation.

  In kidney transplantation research, ex vivo perfusion parameters such as creatinine clearance, arterial flow patterns, and oxygen consumption during normothermic perfusion have been used to distinguish functional from non-functional grafts, even when biopsy histology shows comparable architecture. A detailed cryopreservation study of vitrified kidneys (Han et al., 2023 - if you are still not familiar with it, shame on you;)) further demonstrates this point empirically: histology and ultrastructure appeared near-normal, yet functional recovery measured by urine production, venous and urine electrolyte composition, and metabolic activity during NMP was essential to establish true viability. After transplantation into nephrectomized recipients, these functional measures normalized over time despite only focal histological injury, underlining the fact that morphology alone cannot predict systemic performance.

  Similarly, in liver preservation, clinical and preclinical data show that dynamic perfusion metrics such as lactate clearance, bile output, and ATP content during NMP are far more predictive of transplantability than static histological assessments. Whereas static cold preservation may maintain gross structure, it often permits metabolic deterioration and ischemia–reperfusion injury that only becomes evident through dynamic function testing.

  Even outside strict cryopreservation work, transplantation research emphasizes that functional testing on machine perfusion platforms, measuring vascular resistance, metabolic waste clearance, oxygen extraction, and organ-specific secretory function, outperforms histology and conventional viability staining in predicting outcomes. This reflects a broader consensus in the field that structure is a necessary but insufficient indicator of biological utility.

The Path Forward: Standardization

If we want cryopreservation to be a scalable pillar of regenerative medicine, we need a “Functional Registry.” We must move beyond “post-thaw recovery” percentages and toward standardized benchmarks:

1. If you insist on cell research, do at least a metabolic flux analysis: Metabolic flux analysis is the most universally informative functional metric for cryopreserved cells, because energy metabolism is the earliest and most sensitive point of failure. However, it should be treated as a baseline assay rather than the definitive functional test, since optimal readouts are cell-type–specific (e.g., electrophysiology for neurons, contractility for cardiomyocytes, cytotoxicity for immune cells).

2. Integrated “Omics”: A persistent limitation in cryopreservation research is the near-total absence of post-thaw multi-omics profiling. When a functional assay under-performs, each omics layer supplies a distinct forensic tool:

   • Transcriptomics immediately flags whether the problem is upstream at the gene-expression level: it reveals stress-induced transcriptional programs (e.g., massive upregulation of HSPA1A, ATF4, or CHOP), repression of lineage-specific or functional genes (e.g., downregulation of INS, PDX1, or MYH6), or aberrant activation of apoptosis/senescence modules. If the cells look alive but do not function, transcriptomics tells you the blueprint itself is corrupted.

   • Proteomics localizes damage one layer downstream: it quantifies actual protein abundance, post-translational modifications, misfolding (increased ubiquitinated or carbonylated proteins), chaperone overload (elevated HSP70/90), or proteolytic degradation (cleaved caspases, proteasome subunits). It can show that even though the mRNA for a critical enzyme or channel is present, the functional protein is missing, aggregated, or inactivated—explaining why the functional test collapsed.

   • Metabolomics (and lipidomics) exposes the final functional bottleneck: it detects ATP/ADP collapse, accumulation of reactive oxygen species markers (8-OHdG, 4-HNE), depleted glycolytic or TCA-cycle intermediates, membrane lipid peroxidation, or toxic cryoprotectant metabolites. These profiles reveal whether the cell has entered a metabolically crippled state even though transcription and translation initially occurred—directly accounting for loss of contractility, secretion, or motility in the functional assay.

   Through integrating these readouts, researchers can now answer the precise question “why did the functional test fail?” with mechanistic insights: transcriptional repression, protein-level damage, or metabolic collapse. This granularity transforms cryopreservation optimization from trial-and-error into targeted engineering of the exact step that broke.

3. In Vivo Transplantation: The ultimate functional test: can a preserved tissue integrate and sustain life in a model organism? It can also apply to organoids (see my latest post for examples)

Why This Matters More Than Ever

1. Reproducibility and Scalability: Cryoexperiments are expensive and technically demanding. If protocols are validated only on viability, labs waste years chasing artifacts. Rigorous functional benchmarks let us compare protocols apples-to-apples and accelerate iteration.

2. Regulatory and Clinical Reality: Regulators (FDA, EMA) demand potency assays for advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs). Viability alone won’t cut it for organ banking or future cryonics-derived regenerative therapies.

3. AI Scaling: At the intersection of AI and cryopreservation, functional data is gold. Based on the results of multiple functional assays, AI can predict optimal vitrification cocktails, cooling and warming protocols, and foundational models simulate rewarming damage. But the training data must be functional metrics, not just survival. Garbage viability data in, garbage predictions out.
   

TL;DR
Don’t publish a cryo study without functional validation.

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Most cell cryopreservation is routine. Whole-organ vitrification has taken major steps forward in rats and even toward liter-scale CPA volumes (I talk about it in the last post). Organoids sit in an awkward middle ground: too large and structured to behave like simple cell suspensions, too small and avascular to benefit from classic organ perfusion strategies. So where are we really, in 2025–2026, with organoid cryopreservation?

What has actually been cryopreserved and functionally revived?

Intestinal organoids ✅

Human intestinal and colonic organoids can be frozen, thawed, and expanded with preserved stemness and the ability to regenerate epithelium-only enteroids/colonoids. Detailed protocols describe dissociating organoids from matrix, resuspending them in DMSO-containing freezing media, long-term storage in liquid nitrogen, and subsequent thawing that yields viable cultures capable of multiple passages and differentiation. Even biopsy specimens can be cryopreserved and later used to generate new GI epithelium-only organoids, which is crucial for biobanking patient material. However, the biopsy specimens are cut into tissue chunks, and cryopreserved via slow freezing in ready-made, DMSO-based cryomedia, so, although very useful, it’s not a breakthrough for cryobiology. Same for the intestinal organoids which are first centrifuged and then treated like normal cells would be.
Another study developed a protocol for mouse colon organoids, supported by theoretical modeling of heat and mass transfer. That study preserved the entire organoid on a Matrigel AND (!) transplanted the thawed organoids into mouse colon to confirm regenerative capacity, which is a bigger step for cryobiology.

Brain organoids ✅

You’d be surprised to know that there is a lot of progress in brain organoid cryopreservation! In one of my favorite papers in cryo ever, Xue et al. (2024) preserved large, multilayered human brain organoids without destroying their architecture or neural identity. They generated cortical organoids from H9 human embryonic stem cells and allowed them to mature to day 21–28, at which point they contain ventricular-zone-like radial structures, proliferative Sox2⁺ neural progenitors, differentiated MAP2⁺ neurons, and early network activity. Crucially, the authors cryopreserved intact whole organoids, not dissociated clusters or centrifuged pellets, selecting spheres of comparable size before freezing to avoid size-dependent variability. Organoids were immersed directly into cryopreservation medium composed of methylcellulose, 10% ethylene glycol, 10% DMSO, and the ROCK inhibitor Y-27632 (they called this cocktail “MEDY”) and then frozen using a controlled cooling protocol. No pelleting step was used, and no mechanical disruption occurred before or after freezing; the entire structure was thawed intact, transferred back into culture, and evaluated as a single unit. The strength of the study lies in how comprehensively they quantified post-thaw recovery. First, morphological integrity was strikingly well preserved: organoids maintained their ventricular-zone-like architecture and layered cortical organization, something the field had previously failed to achieve. The MEDY organoids did not fragment, swell abnormally, or collapse into debris (common outcome under DMSO-only conditions, which produced large amounts of cell debris and even complete dissociation in the sucrose groups). Quantitatively, MEDY-treated organoids showed high retention of Sox2⁺ progenitors and MAP2⁺ neurons, each >1.5-fold higher than in DMSO-only controls, and apoptotic cells were minimal, in stark contrast to trehalose-, sucrose-, glucose-, and proline-supplemented media, which produced extensive cell death. Functionally, the thawed organoids recovered robust neurite extension when embedded in Matrigel: axonal projections in the methylcellulose–ethylene glycol conditions (the core of the MEDY formulation) were significantly longer than those preserved with DMSO alone, demonstrating that not only cell survival but neuronal outgrowth capacity was maintained. The MEDY protocol scaled beyond a single organoid type, successfully preserving dorsal forebrain, ventral forebrain, optic vesicle, spinal cord, and even epilepsy patient-derived organoids without architectural collapse or loss of regional identity. The next step for future studies would be to functionally test them.

Heart organoids ✅
Do you recall nanowarming with iron oxide particles from my last post? It turns out this technique enabled cardiac organoid cryopreservation! The development of a heart organoid vitrification workflow coupled to Fe₃O₄-based magnetic nanowarming, enabled rapid, spatially uniform rewarming of vitrified cardiac organoids. In this system, post-thaw heart organoids show significantly improved survival, beating rate, contractility, histological integrity, and multi-electrode array readouts compared with conventional slow-warming approaches, suggesting that nano-rewarming can mitigate thermal stress and ice-related damage in larger 3D cardiac constructs.

Lung, Liver and pancreatic organoids 🫤
I have not found papers that cover whole liver organoid cryopreseration, but there has been a paper that successfully cryopreserved and later cultured, smaller chunks of the liver organoid. For lungs and pancreatic islets, I only found papers that describe cryopreserving cells, and growing an organoid from thawed cells.

Kidney Organoids ✅
Human kidney organoids derived from iPSCs or primary tissue can now be reliably cryopreserved as intact whole structures. A 2024 vitrification protocol achieved ~91% post-thaw viability, preserved nephron segments (podocytes and tubules), and retained regenerative capacity against toxins like cisplatin comparable to fresh controls.

Did I miss any organoids you found interesting in terms of cryo? Let me know in the comments:

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What is the next frontier?

The first frontier is functionally validated preservation. Many protocols define “success” as post-thaw morphology plus a viability stain. That may be adequate for routine passaging, but it is not enough for organoids used as quasi-clinical surrogates. The second frontier is controlled CPA delivery and removal. The main technical bottleneck is still how to load enough cryoprotectant to avoid ice, without inflicting lethal osmotic stress or toxicity. The third frontier is volumetric nanowarming at organoid scale. Nanowarming has already demonstrated major advantages over convective rewarming in perfused rat hearts and large CPA volumes: faster, more uniform heating and dramatically reduced risk of devitrification.Finally, there is a conceptual frontier: standardization and biobanking. Right now, every lab has its own slightly modified “house protocol.” As organoids move toward clinical and regulatory environments, we will need harmonized, validated cryopreservation workflows that define acceptable viability thresholds, functional readouts, and molecular fidelity benchmarks.

How to get to the next frontier of organoid cryopreservation?

The review paper by Han et al (2024) from Dr Yi Xu’s lab where I have the honor of practicing at, outlines the roadmap for organoid cryopreservation that extends beyond saying “better CPAs, less thermal gradients”. That paper makes it clear that the future of organoid cryopreservation depends on technologies that solve the physical constraints of 3D tissues. Microfluidics is one of the most transformative directions: instead of dunking organoids into high-dose vitrification solutions, microfluidic platforms allow precise, model-based CPA loading, using controlled flow, stepwise concentration ramps, and real-time osmotic tuning to avoid the catastrophic swelling and shrinkage that occur in bulk methods. These chips also let researchers measure permeability parameters directly in organoids, giving the field its first chance to design CPA schedules based on kinetics rather than guesswork. On the vitrification side, the review emphasizes “minimal-volume” formats such as Cryomesh, Cryotop, and hollow fibers, all of which achieve faster cooling and warming by physically reducing the thermal mass around each organoid. A Cryomesh, for example, spreads organoids across a thermally conductive lattice that wicks away heat during plunging, while ultrathin films on Cryotop devices allow vitrification using only microliters of solution meaning higher cooling/warming rates without raising CPA concentration.

For short-term storage, the paper highlights technologies that avoid freezing entirely. Oil-sealed supercooling keeps organoids in a metastable, ice-free state by physically isolating the medium from air, preventing heterogeneous nucleation and allowing storage at −4 to −20 °C without vitrification. Isochoric supercooling takes the idea further: by sealing samples in a rigid, constant-volume chamber, any attempt at ice formation immediately raises pressure, suppressing further crystallization. This allows low-CPA or CPA-free preservation with surprisingly high functional recovery in tissues like islets and engineered cardiac constructs.

Have you heard of any of these technologies? Let me know in the comments!

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Why does organoid cryopreservation matter?

If you are like me your initial reaction to this substack would be “okay, okay, cool, but let’s move to organs, or anything that brings us closer to the whole-organism cryo”. However, just like it was shown in the Han et al (2024) review, organoids can be used as a testing ground not only for drug discovery, but also for novel cryotech, giving more reliable and scalable results than cell cultures.

For drug discovery and toxicology, cryopreserved organoid banks would allow standardized, repeatable assays across batches, sites, and years. For personalized medicine, the ability to freeze and share patient-derived organoids would underpin multicenter trials where different interventions are tested on genetically matched tissue. For regenerative medicine, cryopreservation is the only way to decouple the timing of tissue manufacture from the timing of clinical need, especially for pancreatic, hepatic, and cardiac constructs destined for transplantation. So if you are not convinced that the cool cryotech will storm from organoid cryo research, at least be certain that there is a lot of capital that can be activated for organoid banking.

There’s also a deeper continuity here. The same problems we are solving for organoids (CPA toxicity, ice avoidance, thermal stress, nanowarming) are exactly the ones limiting whole-organ cryopreservation and long-term organ banking. Techniques developed for organoids will feed back into organ work, and vice versa. In that sense, every incremental improvement in organoid cryopreservation is a step toward a future where storing complex human tissues, on demand and at scale, is normal rather than aspirational.

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I feel like the world of cryopreservation is getting more and more buzz lately, but the state of the art still remains the 2023 rat kidney successful cryopreservation, validated by transplantation. Has the needle moved forward at all recently? I analyzed the google scholar profiles of the most impactful PIs in cryo, and then did a more general key word search in the attempt to answer this question. Here is my subjective take on the three most impactful recent publications in cryobiology.

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1) Scaling Vitrification to Larger Organs

Gangwar, L. et al. (2025). “Physical vitrification and nanowarming at liter-scale CPA volumes: toward organ cryopreservation”
Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63483-2

This paper will likely be cited as the 2025 cryopreservation publication.

What they did:
The authors developed a protocol to take multi-liter volumes of cryoprotectants (CPAs), big enough for human organs, and vitrify them without ice. They combined controlled cooling with nanowarming (using iron oxide nanoparticles activated by magnetic fields) for fast, uniform reheating. They also vitrified porcine livers without ice formation, but did not rewarm them for this study.

Why it matters:
So although this is just a proof of concept for bags of CPAs, rather than actual organs, this study addresses two of the hardest problems in large-scale cryopreservation:

1. Avoiding heterogeneous ice formation during cooling, and

2. Preventing cracks and devitrification during warming.

This work demonstrated avoidance of the former in pig livers, and latter with the liter volume CPAs.

Impact:
For the first time, organ-sized vitrification seems engineerable. This is the clearest line of sight for organ cryobanking there’s ever been. And although the largest successfully rewarmed organ, validated by transplantation, remains the rat kidney (also by Bischof group), this paper sends the message “we are going after human organ cryobanking”, which is a big step for academia-based cryo.

Other fun facts from the paper:

I really liked the figures where they approximate the necessary cooling and warming rates for selected organs, as a function of their adult-size-volume. It shows that the minimum cooling rate decreases with volume, which is not intuitive. Let’s talk a little bit more science. What the model is really capturing is geometry and thermal diffusion. Larger organs have a larger characteristic length scale (Lc)​, which fundamentally changes how heat is transported to the center. The center becomes the bottleneck. Once the surface vitrifies and thermal gradients establish, the minimum rate required to avoid ice nucleation at the center is governed by bulk heat transport, not just surface kinetics.

Panel (b) is even more interesting to me.

The blue curve shows how the minimum cooling rate collapses rapidly as Lc​ increases. For small characteristic lengths (sub-centimeter), the required cooling rates are extremely high. But as you move toward organ-scale dimensions, the required rate approaches very low values. At the same time, the red curve shows the tradeoff: as Lc​ increases, the minimum vitrifiable CPA concentration increases. So while the cooling constraint relaxes, the chemical toxicity and vascular damage due to viscous liquid perfusion constraints tighten. That tradeoff is the real engineering battlefield.

Did you think I’d stop with the science talk so soon? You must not read enough of my posts;)

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The actual fun is with the figure about nanowarming. First: nanowarming is fundamentally different from conductive warming.

In traditional warming, heat diffuses from the surface inward: Bigger organ → longer diffusion path → slower center warming. That produces smooth scaling behavior. Nanowarming does not rely primarily on surface heat flux. Instead, iron oxide nanoparticles distributed through the vasculature absorb energy from an alternating magnetic field and generate heat volumetrically. The heating rate depends on:

• Nanoparticle concentration

• Magnetic field strength and frequency

• Distribution uniformity

• Vascular volume fraction

• Local perfusion accessibility

• Thermal conductivity of tissue + CPA

That already tells us it won’t scale cleanly with organ volume.

This paper shows that nanowarming rate correlates with vascular fraction, not volume. Organs with higher vascular density (lung, eye) show higher predicted nanowarming rates. Organs with lower vascular fraction (ovary, testis) show lower rates even if their volumes are comparable or larger. So the dominant scaling variable here is not size, but how well you can perfuse nanoparticles into the tissue. You cannot assume constant nanoparticle concentration across organs. Perfusion resistance, capillary density, endothelial permeability, and vascular geometry differ significantly.

On the note of nanowarming, another 2025 paper that deserves a shoutout is “Scalable Purification of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles for Organ Cryopreservation and Transplantation” also from the Bischof group. I’m placing it as a sub-mention, because although it didn’t show us a new proof of concept, it’s crucial for the field because it gives an exact recipe for the nanoparticles that I described above. The group could have as well formed a company around it and cash the ready-made product. I highly recommend everyone in the field to read it and understand it, for higher-order ideation on the new cryo solutions.

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2) Functional Revival of the Mouse Hippocampus Cells After Whole-Brain Vitrification

Preprint: “Functional recovery of the adult murine hippocampus after cryopreservation by vitrification”
bioRxiv, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.22.634384v3

This preprint matters, because instead of just survival (the days of which as a valid cryo endpoint for cells are largely over) it shows function.

What they showed:
The part of the paper that is the most exciting for me shows that they cryopreserved the entire mouse brain, and although the whole organ was clearly damaged, the hippocampus, or at least the cells extracted from it, show electrochemical functionality. The whole brain was clearly stressed. There were perfusion challenges, dehydration issues, variability in recovery rates, and a non-trivial failure fraction.

Why it matters:
This is not a “perfect organ recovery” story, but it’s the largest, partially successful, published attempt at brain cryopreservation.

3) Increased understanding of organ cracking - and how it can be prevented

Paper: Higher Glass Transition Temperatures Reduce Thermal Stress Cracking in Aqueous Solutions Relevant to Cryopreservation
Scientific Reports - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-13295-7

Problem:

One of the major problems in organ cryopreservation is that they tend to crack during warming. Cooling and warming generate temperature gradients, which produce tensile stress in brittle aqueous glasses. Moreover, almost all CPA cocktails have a narrow glass transition temperature (Tg) band (≈ −120 to −130 °C), and Tg itself has rarely been treated as a controllable mechanical variable.

This paper asks what if fracture risk is fundamentally tied to Tg?

What they did:

The authors vitrified and rewarmed separate DMSO, glycerol, xylitol, and sucrose solutions directly imaging how much cracking occurred. Importantly, they differ in their Tg by more than 50 °C (concentration-dependent). They then built a mechanical model to calculate how much tensile stress develops during cooling for solutions with different Tg values. Both the experiments and the simulations showed the same result: solutions with higher glass transition temperatures cracked less and experienced lower peak tensile stress during cooling. In the simulations, lowering Tg increased the maximum stress by roughly fourfold across the range studied

Why it matters

This paper suggests that the dominant CPA chemistries may be thermomechanically suboptimal. Although they allow us to vitrify large samples, their Tg makes them prone to stress accumulation. This work reframes Tg as a design variable in next-generation CPAs.

Looking Forward

We’re still early in the timeline from proof-of-principle to clinical utility for organ cryobanking. Let alone revival of the whole organism. Major hurdles remain:

• Full organ post-thaw functionality (especially vascular integrity)

• Standardized CPA formulations with minimal toxicity

• Integrated warming methods compatible with clinical workflows

But the research published in 2025 shows those hurdles are ripe for engineering and scientific attack, and that practical cryopreservation is transitioning from science fiction to scientific reality.

Did I miss any of the papers you found impactful? Are you looking for answers for specific cryo questions? Let me know in the comments!

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Is it not a massive milestone that we can now handle the entire ordering process through an LLM? Think about it, it’s not just about food! You tell the AI your symptoms, and it selects and sends the right medication straight to your door (for the non-emergency stuff, obviously). That is a fundamental shift in how we live.

I was so pumped that I decided to write this article, which, for the record, is my first piece that has absolutely nothing to do with longevity or cryo.

While researching, I discovered that Google actually launched a similar capability a few weeks ago called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). But why hasn’t anyone heard about it? It barely made a ripple in the West. Alibaba, on the other hand, didn’t just wait for people to get excited. They noticed the lack of enthusiasm and leaned in hard spending 3 billion RMB on “free delivery coupons.”

The result? Qwen is now the most downloaded AI app in China. It turns out that when you bridge the gap between “cool tech” and “free lunch” people finally pay attention (and the boba economy spiked - people placed over 10 million orders in 9 hours, surging to 120 million in 6 days)

I decided to compare Google and Alibaba on their AI e-commerce startegy. Why not other companies? For e-commerce discussion, payment is a key discriminator. In the west, out of the 4 LLMs that matter (ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and Claude), only Google has payment infrastructure (Google pay). In China, Alibaba and Tencent control the dominant payment rails, but only Alibaba aligns its LLM, commerce platform, delivery network, and Alipay into a single vertically integrated transaction stack.

Let’s try to understand what made it possible for Alibaba to such severly outcompete Google with basically the same e-commerce concept. It boils down to 4 categories: the LLM itself, shopping platform, payment and delivery.

Layer 1: The Intelligence Layer

At its core, the intelligence layer is about the raw capabilities of the AI models powering these systems: Alibaba’s Qwen versus Google’s Gemini. Both are cutting-edge LLMs, but their strengths diverge in ways that reflect their ecosystems and target markets.

Gemini shines in global multimodality with seamless integration. It’s ranked highest on benchmarks like MMMU-Pro (multimodal understanding) and Video-MMMU, making it ideal for diverse, international applications where users might upload photos of ingredients for recipe suggestions or analyze videos for shopping recommendations. This broad capability stems from Google’s vast data resources, including YouTube and Search, allowing Gemini to process real-world inputs in a more “global” way. For instance, in agentic commerce, where AI acts on user intent, like booking or buying Gemini excels in long-horizon, multi-step workflows, such as planning a trip that involves parsing flight images, audio reviews, and code for integrations.

Qwen, on the other hand, is finely tuned for Chinese agentic tasks, emphasizing efficiency in multi-step reasoning and tool coordination within Alibaba’s closed ecosystem. It’s optimized for high-context scenarios common in China, like coordinating with local services (e.g., Ele.me for food, Amap for navigation). Benchmarks show Qwen3-Max-Thinking edging out Gemini 3 Pro on rigorous tests like Humanity’s Last Exam, highlighting its prowess in complex, agentic workflows requiring external data retrieval. Qwen’s hybrid reasoning supports custom agents for domain-specific tasks, such as e-commerce customization, without rigid structures.

But here’s the crux: Intelligence alone is inert without action. In China, Qwen wields “execution authority” through Alibaba’s vertical stack directly interfacing with Taobao, Ele.me, and Alipay to fulfill orders autonomously. Tell Qwen to “order a customized boba,” and it searches inventory, applies tweaks, processes payment, and dispatches a rider, all without leaving the chat.

In the West, Gemini operates in a fragmented landscape. Google’s UCP is an open standard, relying on partnerships with Shopify for e-commerce, Uber Eats for delivery, Stripe or PayPal for payments, and others. This means Gemini must negotiate permissions at every step: API calls to check stock, user consents for data sharing, compliance with local regulators (e.g., GDPR in Europe), and navigation through competing ecosystems like Apple Pay or Amazon. Fragmentation introduces latency and potential failures if a partner app glitches. As one analysis notes, while Gemini offers higher autonomy in reasoning, its agentic tasks often require more user guidance due to these external dependencies. The result? Agentic commerce feels constrained, like a powerful engine throttled by red tape. To truly compete, Google might need deeper integrations or acquisitions, but antitrust scrutiny could hinder that.

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Layer 2: Commerce Density

China’s setup is a perfect storm for agentic AI: extreme urban density, scooter-based logistics, designated delivery cabinets, and the majority of households relying for delivery for everyday meals.

Average delivery times hover around 20-30 minutes, with costs per order low (around 18% of total payment, often subsidized). Abundant riders (estmiantes say about 10 million via platforms like Ele.me and Meituan combined). With China’s food delivery market at $40.2 billion in 2024, and 545 million users placing orders frequently, the ecosystem thrives on scale. We are moving from “Why would I take a 10 minute walk to a nearby shopping complex for a boba, if I can order it online?” to “Why would I bother opening an app and choosing the restaurant, and my order if I can just ask Qwen to do it for me while I take a bath/play my game/ work on my project*?”

Contrast this with the US: Suburban sprawl dominates, where homes are spread out, requiring car-based logistics that inflate costs (25% of order value) and times (often 45-60 minutes). Higher labor costs mean fewer riders per capita, and without widespread smart lockers, deliveries involve more handoffs. Consumers pay 30-40% more than the base food price via apps like DoorDash or Uber Eats, making it feel premium rather than routine. Usage reflects this: Americans order delivery about 4.5 times per month on average, versus China’s near-daily habit for many. App-switching friction compounds it; Gemini might suggest a meal, but you bounce to Uber Eats for checkout, killing the seamless agentic flow.

Also let’s not forget that Qwen food delivery is a huge win for people like me who take an hour to decide what do eat: “is it healthy?”, “but I had Thai yesterday…”, “I don’t feel like having chicken tonight”… Now, I can talk about it with AI and it can even suggest what would be healthier for me given my past food order history and biormakers (if I upload them;))

Layer 3: Payment

Alipay, launched by Alibaba in 2004, dominates China’s mobile payments landscape with over 1.43 billion users worldwide as of mid-2024, capturing around 54% of the third-party mobile payment market alongside WeChat Pay’s 40%. This duopoly accounts for over 94% of transactions, fueled by seamless QR code and biometric (face ID or PIN) payments that eliminate app-switching (try paying with cash in China, and DM me with how it went;)). In Qwen’s agentic setup, users confirm orders conversationally, and Alipay handles the rest—applying discounts, processing via stored credentials, and completing in seconds without leaving the chat. Low fees (often 0.1 yuan for small transfers) and no interest on wallets keep funds circulating within the ecosystem, boosting retention.

In Google’s UCP, payments integrate with Google Pay, using saved Wallet credentials for quick checkouts in AI Mode on Search and Gemini, with PayPal support incoming. However, this federated model introduces friction: reliance on third-party processors like Stripe or PayPal means variable fees (2-4% vs. China’s near-zero for in-ecosystem transfers), potential API latencies, and compliance with diverse regulations (e.g., GDPR, PCI DSS). Adoption lags, only about 25% of Americans use mobile wallets like Google Pay, compared to China’s 73%+ for daily transactions. Cultural factors compound this: U.S. consumers prefer credit cards for rewards and protections, leading to slower shifts from traditional methods.

What’s next?

Naturally, right after the initial wonder of my first LLM purchase, I started having questions and concerns. Thankfully, it’s still a human-in-the-loop system, so AI can’t just go rogue and buy stuff with your money that it deems beneficial. The next big worry? Ads. If the cognitive load of switching platforms and fumbling through payments gets wiped out, you could just tap an ad and buy on impulse, especially when it’s hyper-targeted, with the AI knowing your emotions, health status, and financial situation. Any illusion of independent thinking while shopping? Trashed. Also, will this further exacerbate the problems baked into the platform economy, if your shop (at least in China) isn’t hooked into delivery networks, you basically don’t exist (though the case is nuanced, ofc). These AIs train on skewed data, potentially funneling you toward Alibaba-favored brands or culturally dominant options, quietly marginalizing less tech oriented sellers (this tips hard into our Right to Be Remembered paper).

And then there is a case of privacy. Qwen already taps into my order history and could soon pull biomarkers or mood data from wearables, handing Alibaba (or hackers) a god’s-eye view of my life.

There are questions, there are simulations, there is a ton of scenarious.

But for now… hey Qwen, can you get me a big cup of the duck poop hand beaten lemon ice tea, no sugar, less ice?

iykyk

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Gleb first contacted me after I published my piece on cryo-mummies. His work sounded familiar; he extracted proteomic signatures from mammoth remains preserved in permafrost. However, when he mentioned he “also ~revived~ count Dracula” I raised my eyebrow enough to dare ask what he meant. It turns out that Gleb and his team can detect proteomic signatures from any “super old” object, and the insights could help us verify historians’ claims about the past. However, Gleb quickly realized that the tech he developped can be applied not only to study the past, but also predict the future.

The Past

In biophysics, there’s a concept known as the folding funnel; it’s a “path” proteins follow as they fold into their functional shapes. But what happens to these shapes over decades, centuries, or even tens of thousands of years? Using paleontological and archaeological objects ranging from insects trapped in amber to parchment manuscripts and even seeds that sprouted after 30,000 years in Siberian ice (yes, they s p r o u t e d = were functionally reviewed) they’re mapping how the tertiary structure of proteins evolves with time. To determine that, Gleb’s team uses the patented EVA-chip extraction system: a deceptively simple strip that functions like a molecular sponge. Originally designed for proteomics and metabolomics, EVA technology allows researchers to gently lift proteins, metabolites, and even viral components from delicate surfaces like 300-year-old parchment, frescoes, or biological remains without destroying the sample. It’s precise enough to distinguish high- from low-abundance proteins, yet flexible enough to work across disciplines, from oncology biopsies to pigment analysis in medieval wood paintings or even Leonardo da Vinci’s Donna Nuda, where it uncovered egg-based binders and restoration layers. Most importantly, the researchers can distinguish the “real marks” from modern contamination picked up on the strip, mainly by assessing how old the molecules are via oxidation, racemization or deamidation. By fractionating molecules based on charge and hydrophobicity, EVA strips enable non-destructive, high-resolution sampling, offering a viable path forward for both preserving the past and diagnosing the present. In fact, because the samples remain stable at room temperature, this technology may one day be embedded into wearable health sensors passively collecting molecular snapshots as you go about your day (see later in the article in “the future” paragraph). However, staying within the historical realm, recent applications include Dead Sea Scrolls fragments revealing scribes’ plant-based diets via legume peptides, and the Aleppo Codex’s fungal culprits behind its corrosion, demonstrating EVA’s power to rewrite history one molecule at a time.

My two favorite of Gleb’s team findings include:

● Bulgakov’s Manuscript Findings: Historically exciting discoveries emerged from the examination of the margins on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita manuscript (one of my favorite novels!) , shedding light on his deteriorating health and reliance on pain-relieving drugs during his final creative years.The non-invasive EVA analysis of the 1930s–1940s typescript pages detected elevated periostin, N-acetyl-β-glucosaminidase and nephrin, peptides (a hallmark of advanced kidney disease) corroborating historical accounts of Bulgakov’s nephrosclerosis, which plagued him in his last four years. Even more poignantly, morphine metabolites were identified in sweat residues, indicating the author’s self-administration of the opioid as a palliative for excruciating renal pain, a detail that humanizes the tormented genius behind his satirical masterpiece (and maybe explains a lot of the scenes…)

● Milan’s Lazaretto Death Registries Findings: Likewise, revelations came from deeper probes into the death ledgers preserved in Milan’s lazaretto amid the devastating 1630 plague epidemic, uncovering traces of the era’s microbial horrors and human desperation. Applied to the yellowed, ink-stained parchments recording over 15,000 plague fatalities, the EVA strips revealed Yersinia pestis antigens (the bubonic plague pathogen) and Bacillus anthracis spores (anthrax), confirming infectious agents lingered on the documents themselves likely from contaminated hands or air. Human traces painted a grim tableau: mouse proteins in scribe sweat suggested famine-forced cannibalism on rodents for sustenance, while cereal and legume peptides hinted at meager diets; heavy metals like lead and copper from inks, plus stress-induced cortisol markers, underscored the scribes’ exhaustion and peril as they toiled in the plague-ravaged quarantine zone

But Gleb didn’t stop at deciphering history. In one of his most audacious experiments, he placed a single protein between superconducting electrodes to create a Josephson junction, a quantum device more commonly used to detect exotic electronic behaviors in physics labs. By inserting a biological molecule into this setup, his team demonstrated that proteins can function not just as static samples but as active elements in quantum sensing platforms. Why does this matter? Because the Josephson junction allows researchers to measure submolecular electrical properties like polarizability, magnetic susceptibility, and electron density without destroying the molecule. In simple terms, this gives us a non-invasive way to peer into the 3D architecture and behavior of individual proteins, something that traditional tools like crystallography or mass spectrometry often struggle to do at such sensitivity or in near-physiological conditions.

At first glance, studying a single protein might sound like an academic exercise; after all, what could one molecule possibly reveal? Traditional techniques require millions of identical proteins, harsh preparation steps, or freeze-frame snapshots that miss dynamic behavior. In contrast, this quantum approach allows scientists to observe how a single, intact protein behaves in real time; how it folds, misfolds, or responds to external stimuli like heat, pH shifts, or even a drug molecule. It matters because biology is full of rare, unstable, or mutated protein forms that escape bulk analysis but drive devastating diseases. With a setup like this, we could detect the earliest signs of molecular dysfunction.

The Future

After years of tracing how proteins persist through millennia, Gleb asked a natural question: what if we turned these tools forward onto living people? He founded Spectrophon Ltd. in 2012, building continuous monitors that offer underexplored capabilities such as the Dehydration Body Monitor (DBM) for real-time sweat and electrolyte tracking during exercise, a non-invasive glucose sensor for diabetes care, troponin detection for early cardiac events, luteinizing hormone for ovulation, and even external toxins like PM2.5. Validated in clinical trials, like a 2017 study of 200 participants showing high accuracy in hydration metrics via Samsung-integrated wearables, these devices apply EVA-inspired molecular capture to everyday life, turning smartphones into proactive health guardians.

Recently, Gleb’s team extended their work into orbit; collaborating with NASA-affiliated researchers to explore how minimally invasive wearables could monitor astronauts’ physiological responses to extreme space stressors like cosmic radiation and microgravity. Using EVA-based biosensing platforms and surface-friendly extraction films, they aim to passively collect biomarkers from sweat, skin, or interstitial fluid during spaceflight. These collaborations are now helping to evaluate markers like cortisol, cardiac stress indicators, dehydration status, and even brain injury biomarkers (like those relevant to traumatic brain injury) using non-invasive dermal interfaces.

Take home message

Zilberstein’s EVA threads remind us that we’re all archives in motion. Whether decoding the fevered scrawls of a plague-ridden scribe or alerting you to a stealthy arrhythmia mid-hike, this molecular bridge reanimates the human story, urging us to live not in isolation, but as echoes of the vast, unfolding now. Gleb’s company is open to partnerships, of any nature: wearable, history decoding, smart sensors - you name it!

Our molecular marks will outlast us.

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Over the weekend, I found myself right in the heart of the World Laureates Association gathering in Shanghai. The conference center was filled with some of the most celebrated minds in science: Nobel, Turing, Breakthrough Prize winners, you name it. I listened to their talks, asked questions, broke bread (well, rather bao buns) with them, listening to their stories, searching for stories I can’t find on wikipedia. And out of that slightly chaotic bundle of conversations, a few insights started to stand out to me about where the real challenges and opportunities in science are right now. Plus, of course, a bit of life advice sprinkled in.

The State of Curiosity

There were multiple, parallel sessions going on, my attention was brough to the one was what I called “academic speed dating”: five-minute “flash pitches” by “young scientist” (quotation marks because they were all associate professors at top iniversities) followed by rapid-fire questioning from laureates. It was chaotic in the best possible way. Physicists interrogated bioengineers, chemists poked at astrophysicists, and somehow it all made sense. A reminder that innovation often happens in collisions, not committees.The talks themselves felt like previews of a near future already in beta: a biodegradable pacemaker smaller than a rice grain, light-powered enzymes disassembling plastics at the molecular level, graphene nanofluidics that probably defy intuition but definitely got everyone nodding wisely.

After the “speed dating” all laurates at the session had a panel disussion. “Blue-sky research” was the quiet hero of the event. I was not familiar with the term they all advocated for so intensly; it’s research with no immediate application, just audacity. The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation seems to be betting big on it, and the laureates were eager to follow.

And here’s another little gem I hadn’t really considered before: intellectual property. It turns out that at places like Stanford, your IP is fully yours, which was kind of a revelation to me. I hadn’t really thought much about who owns the ideas you come up with in academia until this conversation. It definitely made me realize that the whole intellectual property landscape is a bigger deal than I gave it credit for, and it’s something I’ll be paying a lot more attention to from now on.

The Machines and the Minds

My favorite track was ofcouse the AI and supercomputers one. It ranged from scientific foundations for quantum computing to thinking ahead of the risks and premises how the world might change. Laureates have a way of slipping existential bombs into casual talk. One suggested that universities might lose relevance within five years, as AI outpaces academic infrastructure and learning becomes distributed, automated, decoupled from institutional calendars. He also pointed out that we’re publishing way too many papers, and that flood of publications can give the public a really skewed idea of what scientists actually do. I agree with this one; sometimes the publications I see really belong to Substack more than to a journal. So in a world when a growing number of papers, especially the non-experimental ones, are written by LLMs, reviewed by LLMs, and submitted by humans who pretend this is not the case, can we honestly say each of the is adding to the understanding of the world? I am not arguing against the AI use, on the contrary, but I do think that a new benchmarking system for “scientific novelty and applicability” is needed.

That thought carried into a discussion about AI’s own limitations. Large models have already consumed most written text, so their future depends on learning efficiency rather than volume. Energy costs, adaptability, and self-supervised learning came up repeatedly, plus the question of whether AGI might appear faster than regulation can spell it.

Meanwhile, the physicists turned the conversation toward supercomputers and the arms race of computation. The unit inherent to supercomputer’s power is an exaflop: 10^18 calculations per second. If every person on Earth did one calculation every second, it would take more than 4 years to do what an exascale computer can do in just one second. What can you actually do with that kind of power? Well, it opens up incredible possibilities. Exascale computing can be used for things like simulating complex climate models, running highly detailed genomic analyses, designing new materials at the atomic level, or even modeling the entire human brain in ways we couldn’t before. The discussions highlighted four key directions. First, there’s quantum metrology (measuring stuff, units etc) , which leverages the delicate properties of quantum states to measure tiny effects with a precision that classical methods just can’t match. Then there’s quantum communication, which is all about securely sharing quantum bits between partners using keys that can’t be eavesdropped on. We also touched on quantum simulation, where we mimic complex materials or exotic quantum phases by using systems of artificial atoms. And finally, of course, there’s quantum computing itself, harnessing superposition and entanglement to solve certain problems that are just out of reach for classical computers. There’s still plenty of research ahead before these technologies are fully realized, but these are the big directions that are shaping the field right now.

So, talking about the top supercomputers, the current top five systems are a pretty impressive lineup. You’ve got El Capitan, Aurora, and Eagle, all American systems. Then there’s Jupiter, which is German, and finally one from Italy, which I did not expect. There’s also one up in Finland. But what really caught my attention was that China was not on the leaders board; it turns out that China has stopped submitting performance data to the global repository that tracks the fastest supercomputers. So while we have this sense that they’re likely outperforming almost everyone else at scale, we just don’t have the actual numbers to confirm it.

The Human Element

After a few hours of exaflops, quantum roadmaps, and politely phrased existential dread, the conversations drifted back to a simpler variable: attention. Several laureates admitted their most durable work began in their twenties or thirties, because reputation hadn’t yet crowded out curiosity and there was still enough ignorance to try the impolite experiments. The warning was implicit (protect your attention before committees rent it by the hour), as was the reassurance (early sparks survive if you feed them consistently, not theatrically).

I also had the heart to heart conversation with one of the laureates about the quality of human relationships. I was shocked when he mentioned working on your shadown side, because I though it was just a gen-alpha tiktok trend, but it turns out that it is deeply rooted in Jungien psychology. He fiercly claimed that we are unable to be flly at piece and we will always be ruled by our emotions, if we don’t identify, reason though and see the impact of our childhood traumas. A discount code to betterhelp, anyone?

The most unexpectedly personal moment, however, came when I introduced myself as Polish. People genuinely praised my country’s scientific and democratic transformation in the recent years. Growing up, I was told I had two obstacles: being a woman and being from Poland. Sitting there among laureates who saw neither as disqualifiers, I realized one of those barriers had quietly dissolved.

If the weekend had a moral, it was this: the tools are getting sharper, AI, quantum, exascale, but the real differentiator remains the same. It’s the willingness to ask naïve questions in sophisticated rooms.

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This raises a provocative question: if we analyze which proteins survived and which degraded in naturally frozen mummies, do we gain insights relevant to modern cryopreservation science?

🔴 TRIGGER WARNING: I included the photo of Ötzi at the end of the article

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“Hey Professor, we found a cryo-mummy” - what do you do?

Maixner et al.’s team must have been pretty shocked when they heard about Ötzi; it was an opportunity that they for sure have not anticipated to ever stumble upon. So, in such an unprecedented scenario, what did they do? First, they had to figure out what to look for. DNA could reveal where he came from and what traits he carried, but to understand what was happening in his body at the time of death, they needed to study the proteins. The team set out to reconstruct the proteome (the complete set of detectable proteins from the Iceman’s brain) to see if any molecular traces of stress or injury had survived.

But before they could extract anything, they had to decide where to sample. Earlier CT scans had shown a that only the occipital lobe of the brain (“vision region”) was relatively well preserved. Guided by CT imaging and 3D navigation, the researchers performed a precise endoscopic procedure to collect two tiny, rice-grain-sized, biopsies from this region. Because the tissue had been desiccated for more than five millennia, it was first rehydrated using saline to allow ancient proteins to dissolve again, and then treated with a solvent that breaks open cell membranes and unfolds proteins without destroying them, particularly effective for lipid-rich neural material. Two complementary extraction protocols were used: one gentle, targeting soluble proteins, and one harsher, involving longer sonication cycles to release material still bound within the debris. The final step was liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) which eventually revealed over 500 proteins, including neuronal cytoskeletal proteins (neurofilament light and medium chains), synaptic vesicle proteins (synapsins), and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). These findings confirm that not only connective tissue but actual neuronal and glial structures persisted after 5,000 years.

The types and properties of the proteins that remained

So, what kind of proteins actually made it through five millennia of freezing, drying, and slow decay? And do they have anything in common like structure or function that makes them tougher than others?

The survivors tend to be structural and extracellular proteins. Collagens (yes, the ones from your longevity powders), for example, have rope-like triple-helix structure, reinforced by special chemical bonds, giving them exceptional resistance to breakdown. Keratins, the proteins that form hair and skin, also endure thanks to tight internal bridges that protect them from oxidation and water damage. In the Iceman’s case, researchers also found blood-clotting and wound-related proteins, such as fibrin and fibronectin, in the region of the brain where CT scans had shown trauma. These proteins naturally form dense networks when blood coagulates, which may have helped them resist enzymatic decay. Small fragments of hemoglobin, trapped within the remains of red blood cells, also survived, protected by the cell’s lipid envelope and the stabilizing iron in the heme group. Another group of persistent molecules were glycoproteins decorated with sugar chains, or N-linked glycans. These sugars act like natural armor, shielding the underlying protein from chemical attack. Similar protective effects likely explain why immune proteins such as complement fragments and serpins have also been detected in other mummified tissues as their modular, compact shapes make them unusually stable.

By contrast, proteins that are flexible or metabolically active in life like enzymes or membrane-bound transporters were almost completely gone. These molecules rely on fluid, dynamic shapes that collapse once the cell dies and its lipid membranes disintegrate.

In short, the molecular survivors of deep time are those built for strength, not speed; proteins meant to provide scaffolding, protection, or repair, persisted.

Here is a quick table for comparison:

Structural Lessons

The Iceman’s proteome reinforces a key principle of cryopreservation: stability isn’t just about temperature, it’s about molecular architecture. What survived did so through dense crosslinking, restricted mobility, and built-in redundancy; what didn’t were molecules that relied on flexibility and fluidity for function.For cryobiology, that distinction is crucial. The same forces that destroyed Ötzi’s enzymes and membranes like dehydration, oxidation, and local pH shifts also threaten modern tissues during freezing and thawing. The lesson is that preservation must be structural as well as thermal. If we want to safeguard living systems, we need strategies that reinforce the vulnerable domains of proteins like stabilizing active sites, shielding flexible loops, and preventing lipid peroxidation before cooling ever begins.

The challenge for cryobiology is to reverse-engineer those outcomes deliberately: to design environments where even the dynamic and fragile parts of life can withstand the long pause, and still remember how to move when warmth returns.

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Physiology or Medicine : Peripheral Immune Tolerance, senescent T cells and sterile inflammation

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.” In simple terms, their work explained how the immune system learns to avoid attacking its own body. More specifically, they identified the transcription factor FOXP3 as the master regulator of CD4⁺ FOXP3⁺ regulatory T cells (Tregs) which are specialized cells that suppress autoreactive T cells in peripheral tissues to maintain self-tolerance and prevent autoimmunity

Does this discovery apply to geroscience? Absolutely, though the connection lies more with the T cells than peripheral immunity. As we grow older, Tregs become numerically and functionally compromised, and senescent. This dysregulation leads to excessive secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as IL-6 and TNF-α, accelerating stem-cell exhaustion, tissue degeneration, and metabolic dysfunction. One of the most discussed phenomena in aging biology today is “inflammaging”, which is the chronic, low-grade inflammation that gradually escalates with age. The problem is so fundamental that chronic inflammation is now recognized as one of the 12 updated Hallmarks of Aging. There are many promising interventions to reduce the inflammation, but to stay within the realm of T cells and geroscience, it is worth noting that CAR-T cells are explored as potential senolytic agents. Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells are patient-derived T cells modified to recognize specific surface antigens. In oncology, they destroy malignant cells; in aging research, early preclinical work now retools them to identify and eliminate senescent cells expressing markers like uPAR or B2M. Conceptually, this represents the inverse of Treg biology: while Tregs suppress excessive immune attack, CAR T cells can be programmed to selectively remove chronically harmful or senescent targets. Both rely on deep understanding of T cell signaling and specificity fields that trace their mechanistic roots directly back to FOXP3 and the regulatory circuitry uncovered by the 2025 Nobel laureates.

Now, does the 2025 Nobel prize in medicine apply at all to cryopreservation? I thought I would be writing a fully speculative paragraph here, but surprisingly, the relationship between T cells and cryopreservation was explored before. To get the obvious out of the way, T cells are preserved in the lab setting to be further used for experiments, and CAR-T cells are cryopreserved as ready-made therapy to be shipped to patients. However, since T cells rely on their ability to detect antigens on the surface of other molecules, their structure responsible for detection must be preserved intact so that the cells could regain function. In spleen samples as well as in CART precursor cells, it was found that while viability decreased after cryopreservation, the functionality remained high. Scaling up, in cryopreserved thymus slices transplantation experiments, the organ was able to regain T cell differentiating ability. I have not found papers exploring what happens to Tregs during whole organ cryopreservation, but a very interesting and applicable insight can be borrowed from the field of transplantology. A concept crucial to avoid in organ cryopreservation is ischemia (when an organ or parts of it don’t get enough blood and oxygen). A study of livers procured for transplant found that ischemic injury, which can happen when you perfuse the organ, attracts a CD4+ helper t cells, which initiate a cascade of inflammatory response. Although this process was not studied under cryopreservation conditions, it is likely that the same scenario happens. Perhaps, including anti-inflammatory small molecules targeting TNF-α or IL-6, or the damage associated molecular patterns introduced by the paper, into the cryoprotective cocktail would improve the perfusion outcomes? If you were looking for a project idea, you just found one.

Chemistry: Metal–Organic Frameworks, bone scaffolds and oocytes

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs).” The term MOF refers to a class of crystalline, porous coordination polymers in which metal ions or clusters (the “nodes”) are connected by organic linkers (the “bridges”) to form extended, three-dimensional networks with internal cavities and channels. These structures combine high surface area, tunable pore size and chemistry, and modular functionalization.

Beyond gas capture and catalysis (their most mature applications), MOFs are increasingly leveraged in biomedical engineering and drug delivery. Their porosity and internal cavities allow for high loading of therapeutic molecules, while the ability to modify pore environments, surface chemistry, and degradation rates enables precise control of adsorption and release kinetics, organ targeting, and stimuli responsiveness (pH, redox, temperature). This great review describes how MOF platforms have been used to deliver small-molecule drugs, nucleic acids, imaging agents, and combination therapeutics, often improving solubility, bioavailability, and localization.

MOFs have already been studied in the context of aging and bone regeneration. Scientists in Shanghai created magnesium and cerium-based metal–organic frameworks (Ce-MOFs) and implanted them onto aged mouse femurs with bone defects to test whether they could rejuvenate old bone tissue. These Ce-MOFs acted like long-lasting antioxidants as the cerium ions could switch between Ce³⁺ and Ce⁴⁺ states to keep removing reactive oxygen species (ROS). This reduced oxidative stress and inflammation, both of which normally drive bone cell aging. As a result, bone marrow stem cells in the treated mice stayed healthier and more active, and immune cells shifted toward a tissue-healingtype . In the end, imaging and histology showed that the treated bones had more new bone growth and stronger structure, suggesting that Ce-MOFs can help restore the regenerative capacity of aging bone.

Now, for cryopreservation, I envision MOFs great future. Several applications of MOF to cryopreservations have already been published. My favorite one is iron-based amino-functionalized metal–organic frameworks (Fe-MOFs) to improve oocyte cryopreservation. The method suppressed ice crystal growth to just 16.8% of the size formed in pure water by forming hydrogen bonds through their amino and carboxyl groups, which allowed them to adsorb onto and stabilize the ice–water interface. Remarkably, these Fe-MOFs also showed intrinsic photothermal activity, rapidly heating from 25 °C to over 86 °C under near-infrared light enabling fast, uniform rewarming that prevents recrystallization. When used to vitrify mouse oocytes, this MOF achieved 95.1% post-thaw survival, even when traditional cryoprotectant concentration was half of what is recommended in the standard procedures. The rewarmed oocytes then have undergone normal fertilization and embryonic development.

In another attempt, researchers in South Korea designed zirconium-based metal–organic frameworks (MOF-801) as smart antifreeze particles to protect cells during freezing. They shaped these nanoparticles with precise surface curvature and attached amino acids valine and threonine, which are the same ones that natural antifreeze proteins use. This gave the MOFs a surface pattern that could “fit” onto the edges of forming ice crystals, blocking them from growing into sharp, cell-damaging structures. When used to freeze human kidney epithelial cells, the smallest MOFs kept more than 60% of the cells alive after thawing (compared to 40% control), showing that engineered materials could physically control how ice forms

On a more speculative note, the blood–brain barrier (BBB) represents a crucial challenge in cryonics. Some cryoprotectants are unable to penetrate it effectively, while in other cases, excessive permeability can lead to cerebral edema. Although this cool paper does not address cryonics directly, the section on ischemic stroke (ischemic injury) demonstrates how metal–organic frameworks can be engineered to deliver drugs across the BBB. Could similar strategies be adapted for cryoprotectant delivery in cryonics applications? Finally, if MOFs can combine mass transfer modulation, structural stability, and heating response, they would transform cryoprotectant design from a passive solvent problem to an active scaffold problem.

In summary, MOFs bring architectural precision to processes that have traditionally been chemically chaotic.

Physics: tunneling, quantum computers and liquid helium

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for showing that quantum effects can appear in large-scale electrical circuits. The scientists, John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis, used a special kind of metal called a superconductor, a material that, when cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero, can carry electricity with no resistance at all. In this ultra-cold state, they placed a tiny barrier inside a superconducting loop and discovered that electrons could tunnel through the barrier (think of a baseball passing through a wall but the wall is intact, in one piece), a purely quantum behavior where particles pass through obstacles they normally couldn’t.

This showed that even a visible, man-made circuit can behave like a quantum system if it’s cold enough. The same tunneling effect that allowed current to jump between energy levels became the basis for superconducting qubits, where scientists now use microwave pulses to control those quantum jumps encoding information in states that can exist as 0, 1, or both simultaneously until measured. This discovery made it possible to build quantum computers and opened an entirely new chapter in how we understand and manipulate matter under extreme cold.

Here, the connection to aging or cryo will be even more stretched than before, but indeed, there are some, like the fact that supercomputers might be able to figure out both;) Although there are no practically useful quantum computers yet, there are quantum-classical generative algorithms that already contribute to science, such as finding the small molecules targeting the KRAS proto-onco gene. I talk about it in my paper Deep learning and generative artificial intelligence in aging research and healthy longevity medicine which has an entire part on quantum computing and aging.

In cryo, the most direct parallel to superconductivity is temperature control. While superconductors operate near –273.15°C (absolute zero), cryopreservation typically cools tissues only to –196°C which is the temperature of liquid nitrogen, at which biological time effectively stops, eliminating the need to go colder for preservation purposes. To reach –273°C, physicists use dilution refrigerators that first pre-cool with liquid helium-4 to about 4 K, then rely on the phase separation of helium-3 and helium-4 isotopes to absorb heat through evaporative cooling inside multi-stage, vibration-isolated vacuum systems designed to maintain stable quantum states. Intriguingly, liquid helium has also been explored as a potential cryogenic medium for biology, offering ultra-rapid cooling rates that enhance vitrification, the glass-like solidification without ice crystal formation, in sensitive cells such as human stem cells, bovine oocytes, and HeLa or L929 cell lines. However, helium’s cost and scarcity have so far prevented large-scale use in organ preservation.

Literature - the appocalypse approaches - so what?

László Krasznahorkai’s Literature Nobel celebrates an author whose works explore persistence amid decay. I admit that I have not read his books yet (in my Audible queue!), but I watched a summary video of his writing to prepare myself for writing this paragraph- there is a lot of talk about death. His meditations on entropy, continuity and the fear of the apocalypse resonate with the existential dimensions of longevity science and moral grounds of cryonics. I prepared a few quotes from his books:

“Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.”

This line could easily appear in a cryonics manifesto or an essay on digital immortality (uploading). In both, death is not the end but a threshold, an interruption before a new continuity; you would have to first cease to exist in the current world, but would (assuming that the tech works) reappear in either the completely different world with possibilities unlimited by the biological constraints (uploading) or in the world that is (hopefully) more technologically, medically and society advanced than what you left behind (cryonics). While the author has most likely meant eternal life in some sort of a religious understanding, if we are being really honest with ourselves, each of the three options (“heaven”, cryonics, uploading) relies on hope of revival in a better place. It is not the purpose of this substack to convince you to believe in an, but please, do me a favor and entertain the idea that the scientifically grounded life extension operates on almost the same moral ground as any religion. In that sense, scientifically grounded life extension is not a rebellion against religion but its secular translation: a faith that technology, not divinity, may one day redeem the finite.

The quote below operates on the same interpretation as the one above, but I am inserting it here for you to get to know László Krasznahorkai’s signature style - loooong sentences.

“I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquility, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here.”

Heaven, cryonics, or uploading… all three emerge from the same existential grammar. They are variations of one sentence humanity keeps rewriting: that decay may not be destiny. Krasznahorkai writes it in prose; scientists write it in protocol.

Peace prize: you can’t push the needle of science forward if you are too conncerned with surviving until the next day

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, for her unwavering fight to restore democracy through nonviolent means. The Nobel Committee recognized her for showing exceptional courage in resisting authoritarian rule, uniting the opposition, and advocating for peaceful political transition despite personal risk. Although the Peace Prize is definitely the hardest to tie to longevity and cryopreservation directly, we have to agree that the questions about life extension as a science can only be asked either in times of prosperity or by people with enough financial and contextual stability to ponder such a high risk ground. Political stability and ethical governance are prerequisites for advancing and democratizing life-extending and biopreservation technologies. Cryonics and longevity medicine cannot flourish in environments of distrust, censorship, or inequity; they rely on transparency, regulation, and moral legitimacy.

Economics: understand why things work, and keep on innovating

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for explaining why economic growth can persist instead of reaching a natural limit. Mokyr traced this shift to the Enlightenment, when technological progress became anchored in scientific reasoning; people no longer just used inventions but sought to understand why they worked, enabling cumulative innovation. Aghion and Howitt formalized this process through the theory of “creative destruction,” in which new technologies continuously replace old ones. Their work showed that progress depends on allowing renewal while managing the disruption it brings. The main lesson for science here is simple: never rely 100% on dogma. I am not suggesting that we question everything as constant skepticism would paralyze progress, but if your findings do not immediately align with what is known or hypothesized, or if your peers dismiss your idea, it is worth giving it focused time, because there may be potential in it. Think about the relatively recent amyloid hypothesis scandal: for decades, the scientific community accepted amyloid buildup as the obvious driver of Alzheimer’s disease, but later it turned out that some of the foundational data supporting that view had been fabricated.

Another takeaway from the 2025 Economics Nobel is the importance of understanding why things work, not just that they work. For example, we know that cryoprotectants function at the physical level to prevent ice formation, but we still do not fully understand the molecular basis of their toxicity. Better insight into what actually happens during cryoprotection could lay the groundwork for designing new, less toxic cryoprotectants directly echoing Mokyr’s reasoning that progress accelerates when mechanisms are understood, not merely applied. To connect Aghion and Howitt’s “creative destruction” to longevity science, consider the evolution of biological aging clocks, where new algorithms continuously replace older ones. Each refinement in geroprotector design or cryoprotectant chemistry mirrors the economic cycle of innovation and obsolescence: hypotheses are tested, fail, and are replaced by better ones. Sustained progress, whether in economies or in biomedicine, requires openness to revision, tolerance for failure, and the belief that improvement has no final state. The Nobel’s message, stripped of discipline, is simple: growth, like life, persists only when we keep dismantling what once seemed sufficient.

Quick summary to shine in conversations

Now, if you want to use this substack as a conference networking conversation driver (or if you are a “fun fact!” A person like me;)) here is a quick summary table.

Do you want to bet on when and to whom the first Nobel prize on aging or cryo is going to be awarded? Comment and let’s discuss

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For over a century, these awards have celebrated human ingenuity at its peak, but what if the next breakthroughs come not from flesh-and-blood researchers, but from silicon-based minds that outthink us in every domain? The Nobel Prizes, established in 1901, honor discoveries or inventions that advance humanity. Traditionally, they’ve gone to individuals or small teams whose work stands the test of time, often years or decades after the fact. Yet in 2024, the Chemistry Prize tipped its hat to artificial intelligence for the first time, awarding David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their development of AlphaFold, the AI system that revolutionized protein structure prediction. AlphaFold didn’t just solve a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, but achieved superintelligence in that domain by surpassing every human expert on Earth at folding proteins with unprecedented accuracy. If superintelligence means an AI outperforming the best humans in a specific discipline, we’ve already crossed that threshold. And once crossed, there’s no uncrossing it.

Are Nobel Prizes awarded for ideas or execution?

Even though the Nobel prize is shared, many people contribute to the discovery, starting from the grad students doing the “dirty work”, through postdocs, ending with senior researchers refining the ideas. Who gets the Nobel prize is usually the principal investigator, who proposes the idea and has executive power over how the experimental execution proceeds, which makes sense because (hopefully) the PI sees the bigger picture and the vision, while a grad student is complaining about “pointless pipetting” morning to night. Perhaps, though, the prize is awarded not for supervising the execution, but for the relentless belief in the potential of the idea. If AI was prompted to execute on the scientific problem, and saw no promising results on the first few tries, would it abandon it in the name of efficiency, or keep tweaking and twisting the workflow until it works (while perhaps opening doors to other research on the way)? A recent survey paper, “A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery”, explicitly suggests a benchmark: the “Nobel-Turing Test,” where an AI system’s discoveries must be indistinguishable in ambition and quality from Nobel-worthy work.

Discovery vs deployment

Alfred Nobel specified that the prizes should go to those who have conferred “the greatest benefit to humankind”. It’s hard to measure the greatest benefit to humankind because technology deployment is one of the greatest barriers. There might be great discoveries that have transformative potential, but if not done at the world’s top 20 universities or companies, the barrier to deployment remains too high to generate measurable impact. So if an AI made a groundbreaking discovery and therefore validated its hypothesis, would it bother going to conferences, publishing in mass media and taking care of BD operations to deploy it, or just mark it as “fully executed workflow”? Answering my own question, perhaps it would delegate the BD task to the BD team of agents, but the more I think about it, the more baffling and improbable it seems that the superintelligent AI would be preoccupied with benefitting humanity. On the other hand, we have thousands of organizations preoccupied with benefiting cats, dogs and other animals, which sets the precedent for “AI caring for cute humans”.

AI Autonomous scientists

We’re engineering embodied AI and AI-controlled robotic workflows that lay the foundation for autonomous scientists, which are systems capable of hypothesizing, experimenting, iterating, and publishing without fatigue or self-doubt. A pivotal work that first opened my eyes to this idea was “Empowering Biomedical Discovery with AI Agents” by Shanghua Gao, and colleagues supervised by Marinka Zitnik (Cell, 2024). Their paper proposed a taxonomy of autonomy levels in biomedical research, ranging from narrow, task-specific tools to agents capable of self-assessment and iterative discovery. At its highest level, they envisioned unprompted AI systems that could generate novel hypotheses, design and execute experiments, interpret results, and ultimately function as scientists in their own right.

A year later, Jiaqi Wei and colleagues expanded this vision in the paper I mentioned before “From AI for Science to Agentic Science” (2025). Gao and Zitnik described autonomy as a linear continuum from narrow tools (Level 1) to self-assessing agents (Level 3). Wei et al. preserve this ascending logic but formalize it into four operational stages: computational oracles, automated research assistants, autonomous scientific partners, and generative architects, defined as entities capable of creating new scientific paradigms. Critically, Wei et al. convert Gao and Zitnik’s abstract taxonomy into an engineering framework grounded in five core capacities: (1) reasoning and planning, (2) tool use and experimental control, (3) long-term memory, (4) collaborative communication among agents, and (5) self-optimization through reflection and evolution. Their Agentic Science Workflow operationalizes Gao and Zitnik’s final stage of unprompted discovery, turning what was once an aspirational end point into a structured, reproducible method for AI-driven science.

How Public Perception Will Shift

The moment an AI receives a Nobel Prize will be less about the medal and more about the mythology of genius. The Nobel stage is where society decides who embodies progress and the first AI recognition will mark the day collective imagination expands to include non-human minds. Initially, there will be discomfort: can something without ambition or pride truly deserve a prize meant for perseverance and vision? Yet, as the benefits of these discoveries touch daily life, better drugs, longer lives, cleaner materials, fascination will replace fear. Awarding a Nobel the to AI, not its creator, could also heavily influence the public perception on how advanced AI is. Statistics suggest that 500-600 million people engage with AI daily (that is 6-7.3% of the world’s population), which is actually surprisingly low. I’d assume that such low score might be not only due to relatively limited deployment, but also fear. So assuming that people see the Nobel prize winners as “good people” or at least beneficial role models, could awarding a Nobel prize to AI transfer these these warm feelings onto the neural network, and therefore increase usage of other (likely less advanced than the “laureate”) AI tools ?

However, depending on which AI expert you choose to listen to, we are still several years away from general superintelligence, so now we can only be talking about awarding AI-human symbiots, like the autonomus agents, a Nobel Prize. However, if we skip forward and entertain the idea of general superinteligence, we should ask: would AI even care about recognition of the work? Would you care that dogs acknowledge your work as transformative, when they cannot even comprehend what work is, let alone your work specifically? Would there be many superintelligent AI agents that would form a society? This question seems like a silly effort of trying to fit an intelligence beyond comprehension, into human, familiar structures. Therefore, the chain of logic by this point in my substack article, evolved to: “Are the 2025 Nobel prizes one of the last ones awarded to humans, and human creators of AI, rather than human-AI ecosystems?”. Once we reach superintelligence, it will likely be the end of the world as we know it, including the Nobel prizes.

How should the Nobel committee adapt

Peter Diamandis often says in his podcast and social media, that AI will not take your job, but people who use AI, will. For the nearest years, the same logic applies to scientific recognition. It won’t be AI winning the Nobel Prize; it’ll be those who use it best. The lone-genius model doesn’t fit an era where discovery emerges from interactions between humans, algorithms, and data ecosystems. What does it mean for the Nobel committee? Perhaps instead of rewarding individuals, we reward systems or collectives, which would be research ecosystems that integrate human and artificial agents? Perhaps new categories will emerge: one for human-AI collaboration, another for systems that autonomously advance science without direct human steering. And maybe, decades from now, the medal will be placed not in a laureate’s hand but in a digital museum of shared milestones where every dataset, prompt, and feedback loop becomes part of a collective memory of how intelligence, in all its forms, sought to understand the world.

With that thought, let’s come back to today’s reality and prepare some popcorn for the 2025 laureates announcements. Perhaps some of the discoveries will be related to aging or cryopreservation, even if tangentially? I’ll observe, and report back if that’s the case.

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The Landscape of Cryopreservation in 2025: A Niche Yet Growing Sector

Cryopreservation sits at the intersection of regenerative medicine, longevity research, and bioethics. Market forecasts indicate robust growth; for instance, the global cell cryopreservation market (used by ~every wet lab, ~every day) is estimated at $13.89 billion in 2025, projected to expand to $77.52 billion by 2034 at a compound annual growth rate of 21.2%, driven by advances in biobanking, stem cell therapies, and transplant logistics. Similarly, cryopreservation equipment, including freezers and storage systems for -196°C, is valued at approximately $676 million this year, with expectations to reach $1.23 billion by 2035 at a 6.2% CAGR. However, there are still no official market estimates for whole body cryopreservation. I asked several LLMs (ChatGPT 5, Grok Expert, Gemini 2.5) to provide estimates and reach a *speculative* consensus, presented below.

“Globally, around 500-650 individuals have been cryopreserved as of mid-2025, with major providers like Alcor (248 patients), Cryonics Institute (over 250), KrioRus (103), Shandong Yinfeng (29), Southern Cryonics (4 in 2025), and Tomorrow Bio (20 humans) accounting for the bulk. Annual preservations hover at 30-40, reflecting slow but steady uptake amid ~5,000-6,000 memberships worldwide. Costs for whole body preservation average $100,000-$200,000: Alcor charges $200,000, Cryonics Institute $28,000, Tomorrow Bio $220,000 plus $55 monthly, and international options like KrioRus or Yinfeng $50,000-$100,000. Membership dues ($120-$500/year) add recurring revenue of $2.5-3 million annually. Speculated 2025 market size: $6-11 million, derived bottom-up from preservations (30-40 * $150,000 average = $4.5-6 million) plus dues ($2.5-3 million), adjusted for ~60-70% whole body focus (vs. neuro/DNA). Broader cryonics reports peg the market at $10-200 million in 2024, growing at 10.5-12% CAGR, but these include neuro and cell preservation; whole body likely comprises the majority.

Projections to 2034 assume 10-12% CAGR, conservative versus cell market’s 21.2%, due to ethical/regulatory barriers. Optimistic scenario (12% from $11 million 2025 base): $31 million by 2034, driven by longevity boom ($9.8 billion in 2025) and providers like Southern Cryonics adding capacity. Conservative (10% from $6 million): $18 million, factoring persistent doubts.”

While these projections outline the financial contours of a still-nascent industry, they also underscore the gap between market enthusiasm and scientific feasibility. Revenues may be growing, but the science behind whole-body cryopreservation remains highly experimental. The state of the art as of September 2025 is cryopreserving, rewarming and transplanting a rat kidney with virtually no life/functional damage at University of Minnesota, where I had an honor of training. So far, no bigger tissue was ever functionally rewarmed and transplanted, so as of now, discussions of achieving that in whole organisms are farfetched. There are still great challenges like cryoprotectant toxicity or irreversible cellular damage during thawing. Ethical debates swirl around the promise of “cheating death,” with proponents arguing it offers hope for terminal patients, while critics highlight unproven revival prospects. This tension between expanding economic signals and unresolved technical barriers defines cryonics today and connects it to the broader landscape of biotech innovation, where longevity-focused investments are gaining momentum, but cryopreservation itself continues to be treated with caution.

Despite this, 2025 so far has seen unprecedented cryo funding.

Key Cryo Financing Events in 2025

2025’s activity centers on a handful of high-profile deals, with total disclosed funding exceeding $65 million in core raises, plus acquisitions around $200 million when including enabling technologies for -196°C storage. Traditional cryonics providers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the Cryonics Institute continue to operate on membership dues and donations rather than venture capital. Instead, startups and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) dominate the headlines. Note: This overview excludes any entries focused on non-cryogenic preservation methods, such as normothermic or hypothermic techniques not involving -196°C.

Until Labs:

Investors/Partners: Founders Fund (lead), Lux Capital, Field Ventures

Purpose/Focus: Develop reversible organ cryopreservation tech at temperatures enabling indefinite storage (around -196°C), including cryoprotectants, perfusion hardware, and rewarming protocols; expand team and infrastructure for human trials. Focus on transplants, with long-term goal of whole-body medical hibernation and fully reversible cryopreservation.

Notes/Details: Total raised >$100M; co-founders Laura Deming (longevity investor) and Hunter Davis emphasize solving organ timing mismatches. Scaled from neural slices to large-animal organs, demonstrating rewarming of cryopreserved neural tissue with restored electrical activity. San Francisco-based; hiring for expansion

Tomorrow Bio:

Investors/Partners: Blast.Club (co-lead), TruVenturo (co-lead, via Nils Regge’s Family Office), Zain S Hasan Charitable Remainder Trust, Asia Venture

Purpose/Focus: U.S. expansion; enhance R&D for preservation quality, including improved cryoprotectants and vitrification for storage at -196°C. Offers whole-body ($220K) and neuro ($80K) cryopreservation with hope of future revival.

Notes/Details: Europe’s first dedicated cryonics lab, founded 2020 by Dr. Emil Kendziorra; preserved 20 humans and 10 pets in partnership with Swiss nonprofit European Biostasis Foundation (EBF), which maintains the long-term cryogenic storage facility in Rafz, Switzerland at -196°C. Over 800 pre-paid signups worth >€160M in contracts, reflecting growing public interest. Investors view it as a “visionary moonshot” in extreme longevity tech. Total raised ~$8.24M; forming local response teams and medical partnerships for rapid post-mortem perfusion

CryoDAO:

• Purpose/Focus: Fund high-impact research in cryopreservation at extremely low sub-zero temperatures (including -196°C), biostasis, and cryobiology, including whole-mammal preservation, new cryoprotectants, vitrified ovaries, CPA databases, and facilities like STASIS. Applications in organs, cryosleep, and human cryo.

• Notes/Details: Decentralized model with 6,000+ members; funded 6 projects (e.g., CRYORAT for high-subzero cryopreservation and revival, ultrasound heating for cryogenic recovery, Cryopets which recently preserved their first animal). Perks for larger contributors include NFTs, facility tours, and emergency kits. Previous BioDAO launch raised $3M; collaborates with organizations like Tomorrow Bio for initiatives like STASIS.

There are other promising startups emerging this year like WakeBio whose financing is not disclosed as of 2025.

Who are the VCs who invest in cryo?

When Founders Fund, famous for early bets on SpaceX and Facebook, writes the lead check into a cryopreservation startup, it signals that cryo has moved from science fiction to a credible frontier market. Founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, is structured as a multibillion-dollar fund investing across stages and has become famous for its early bets on some of today’s worlds most famous companies. In 2025, it led Until Labs’ $58 million Series A, continuing its tradition of backing ambitious science ventures. Lux Capital, founded in 2000 and managing several billion in assets from New York, focuses on frontier technologies where science meets engineering; its reputation was cemented through investments such as Aurora Innovation in autonomous vehicles and its role in Until Labs reflects this appetite for high-risk, high-reward biology. Field Ventures, by contrast, is a smaller early-stage investor concentrating on niche tech and vertical SaaS, with a track record including Ambrook in agricultural finance; its participation in Until Labs suggests a willingness to branch opportunistically into biotech. On the European side, Blast.Club, a French investment club launched in 2023, is structured as a membership-based syndicate allowing individuals to pool capital in tranches as low as €1,000, and one of its most visible deals was co-leading Tomorrow Bio’s €5 million seed round to expand cryonics. Alongside them, TruVenturo, the Hamburg-based family office and venture builder founded in 2010 by entrepreneur Nils Regge, has backed more than 30 startups and co-founded Audibene, the hearing aid marketplace later acquired by Sivantos; its participation in Tomorrow Bio reflects a natural extension of its health and longevity investment thesis. Decentralized models via DAOs like CryoDAO leverage blockchain for community funding, raising questions about governance but enabling “fringe” research in cryogenic tech

Bottomline

Taken together, the financing patterns of 2025 reveal that cryopreservation is no longer sustained only by idealistic nonprofits or isolated enthusiasts. Instead, it has become a testing ground for very different classes of capital; top-tier VCs like Founders Fund treating organ cryo as a frontier moonshot, family offices and investment clubs experimenting with longevity as an asset class, and DAOs mobilizing grassroots enthusiasm into research dollars. The scientific breakthroughs remain incremental, and whole-body revival is still firmly speculative, yet the money now flowing into the field creates a small but durable industry footprint. The point is not that cryonics is about to rival mainstream biotech, but that it has crossed the threshold from fringe to investable niche, drawing in a spectrum of backers who see in cryo either a pragmatic tool for transplantation, a cultural statement about life extension, or a long-tail bet on human futures. In that diversity of motives lies the real story: cryopreservation is no longer just a dream of resurrection, but a mirror of how different investors imagine, and are willing to pay for, the edges of human possibility.

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A4BEE and QB Systems

“We are solving problems requiring adding, mixing and measuring,” A4BEE’s CEO Krzysztof Kaczor told me, as I was trying to put their outer-space-looking device in context. Turns out it was a Versatile Bioreactor for Cell Culture and Fermentation. First things first: a bioreactor is a device or system that provides a controlled environment for the growth of microorganisms, cells, or tissues. They offer a very user-friendly solution for any business dealing with any biological system requiring frequent control and modifications: algae, yeast, cell culture… you name it! Their priority, other than effectiveness and reliability, is ease of operating and modularity. Their machine follows LEGO-like design, all the cables are color-coded, so you don’t need hours of training, 100-page manual or a 24/7 support. This is great, given that solutions like that are supposed to simplify your research life, not add another layer of complexity. If you’re in academia or an early-stage biotech, you know the pain of countless alarms to wash cells/ add growth medium/ check on temperature etc… how nice would it be to have a “robot” do it! Well, now you have a solution straight from Poland (which would not take too much of your precious lab space).

Below you can see their Bioreactor. The team told me to pay special attention to the foam detector, which is their newest component;) Why would you need to detect foam, you may ask? Foam forms in a bioreactor when air and mixing cause proteins in the liquid to trap bubbles, so detecting it is important to avoid contamination, blocked sensors, poor oxygen flow, and spills. It’s important to keep your cell culture happy:)

The world turns out to be small, because they just developed a novel perfusion chamber for microfluids research and collaborated with NanOX (also present at bio) to develop hardware and software to support transport and recovery of donor kidneys; something of great interest to me relating to my current internship at University of Minnesota. TheNanOX Recovery Box (developed with engineering partner A4BEE) is an emerging, battery‑backed, integrated hardware/firmware/software platform designed to maintain controlled perfusion conditions and real‑time monitoring for donor kidneys (and future organs) during transport, with separated wet/dry zones to protect electronics and >2 hours of fully powered autonomous operation for out‑of‑hospital moves. Built from concept to functional prototype in roughly four months, the system is now being advanced toward a certification‑ready version that meets medical‑device and quality standards (ISO 13485, ISO 9001) through a multi‑unit build program funded by a ~PLN 2.3M agreement and supported by aligned QMS implementation across NanoSanguis (a NanoGroup subsidiary) and A4BEE.

They also have a great blog on everything concerning the Lab of the Future, so make sure to check them out!

Selvita

Selvita is one of the largest preclinical CROs in Europe. They are publicly traded, selling at 7.81 USD per share, as of July 13th. They had their own booth, with the name hanging from the ceiling (status symbol much;)). The best part, which I retroactively found out, was that they publish a lot in scientific journals; music to my ears!

The company fields ≈ 900 scientists across seven sites: Kraków, Poznań, Wrocław, Zagreb, Cambridge (UK), Boston and a commercial hub in San Francisco, occupying ~17 000 m² of purpose-built labs and already seasoned by 4 000-plus projects for about 750 clients. Their Polish core runs an integrated small-molecule engine: 1536-well and Echo-dispensed HTS (ultra-miniaturised high-throughput screening plates filled by an acoustic liquid handler), AI-guided medicinal chemistry, fragment and macrocycle libraries, and a structural-biology group that has solved more than 170 ligand complexes to date, feeding crystal data straight back into design loops. Wrocław, meanwhile, is an antibody foundry with two fully human phage-display libraries (10¹⁰-member synthetic and 10⁹-member naïve) able to deliver royalty-free IgG leads in roughly 12-15 weeks, with optional AI-guided affinity maturation and full developability panels. For translational read-outs, the Zagreb site (formerly Fidelta) offers >60 AAALAC- and OLAW-accredited in vitro and in vivo models (cell and animal disease systems vetted by global/U.S. animal-welfare bodies) spanning inflammation, fibrosis, infection and respiratory disease, plus matched human-tissue assays for cleaner PK/PD alignment. Layer on in-house ADME/DMPK, early tox, GLP bioanalysis and even GMP clinical-batch release, and you get a modular, end-to-end R&D stack that has already pushed more than 100 integrated programs forward, seven of which have entered the clinic.

It turns out they work a lot in fibrotic diseases, which share a lot of pathways with the aging process. I had a pleasure of talking with Dr. Kristy Winn about Selvita’s interests in expanding to cover more projects related to aging. A week after our encounter, they released a blog about senolytics and age related diseases, which concluded a three part series by Kristy about “healthy aging”. Although I believe that “healthy aging” is an oxymoron, things are moving for Selvita in that field, and I’m really excited to see more from them in the future!

Ardigen

Ardigen is a data-science CRO that sells algorithms and bioinformatic firepower which ranked as the global top-5 % of AI-focused research contractors. R&D groups drowning in multi-omics data who want targets, epitopes or biomarker signatures, but without building an internal data-science team would be potential Ardigen customers. Founded in Kraków in 2015, the company has grown to roughly 150-200 bioinformaticians, machine-learning scientists and software engineers with satellite offices in South San Francisco and Cambridge, MA. Lab-talk-wise, Ardigen owns almost no bench space; instead it deploys cloud-native platforms: ARDisplay models HLA-II presentation, while ARDentify matches immunopeptidomics spectra to precise HLA-bound peptides for neoantigen or TCR-T work; ARDitox flags dangerous T-cell cross-reactivity; and phenAID fuses cell-image, structural and omics data to predict the mechanism of action and bioactivity straight from phenotypic screens. A fresh Databricks partnership underpins its Clinical Data Lakehouse, letting sponsors unify trial datasets in a compliant, query-ready environment rather than a patchwork of CSVs and LIMS exports. The model works: Ardigen reports 300-plus projects for more than 60 biotech and pharma clients such as Boehringer Ingelheim, in its first eight years, as well as esteemed partners such as AWS or the Broad Institute. Moreover, in January 2025 Ardigen joined the NVIDIA Inception program, securing early access to NVIDIA’s high-performance GPUs, CUDA libraries and engineering support.

Bioforum - Polish Biotech Companies Association

Bioforum keeps member companies up-to-speed on the field’s fast-moving science by curating a constant flow of research news, best-practice exchanges and sector analyses, while simultaneously lobbying Warsaw, Brussels and other regulators through its seat in EuropaBio to ensure innovation-friendly policies for polish biotech. Beyond advocacy, BioForum runs the CEBioForum conference and partnering platform held annually since 2000 plus year-round webinars, seminars and specialist training that build both technical skills and deal-making networks.

This April, during their annual conference, they had a panel about longevity, featuring many good friends and “big names” in longevity such as Dr. Marek Postuła who is the founder of the polish healthy longevity medicine society and host of the #wstronedlugowiecznosci (towards longevity) radio show, Dr. Ricardo Gaminha Pacheco who is the BD and licensing director at Insilico Medicine and a fellow volunteer at the Longevity Education Hub and Dr Emil Syundyukov who is the CEO of Longenesis which provides digital platform for post-market research and patient engagement (I was SO proud and happy to see them win the Supernova Challenge 2.0 in Dubai, described as the world’s largest early-stage startup pitch competition!). That was just one panel in a whole lineup of fascinating discussion, so make sure you book your tickets to BioForum’s conference in 2026! BioForum’s president and CEO Dr. Magdalena Kulczycka and BioForum’s board member Grzegorz Dębowski shared with me during our discussion in Boston, how much action and investment BioForum is undertaking to make their conference the largest and most crucial biotech event in the region - they are clearly on an excellent path towards achieving that.

BioForum’s international reach was strengthened in 2024 when the union became Poland’s delegate to the International Council of Biotechnology Associations (ICBA), giving local firms a voice in global debates on biotech regulation and market access.

I cannot not mention their accelerator program, which although has ended the official admissions, still can accept some new members so pay attention! The “LEGO-block” program built to lift six pre-Series A biotech start-ups from TRL-3 science (established proof of concept) to investor-ready businesses in under a year. It begins with a Warsaw boot-camp and tailored mentoring to map each team’s gaps, then layers study visits to Belgium’s deep-tech ecosystem, weekly online workshops, and direct pitch sessions with international VCs and industry leaders; the two most promising cohorts earn free lab space through February 2026 to fast-track their R&D. Graduates showcase their progress on the CEBioForum stage, tapping the association’s 20-year network while continuing to receive post-acceleration support as alumni and future mentors.

Polpharma

I’ve talked about CROs and associations, now let’s talk about manufacturers. Polpharma Group is Poland’s flagship pharma manufacturer and one of Central-Eastern Europe’s biggest drug suppliers: founded in 1935, still privately owned, it now ships ≈400 million medicine packs a year to 40-plus markets, employs ~5,600 people and books >€1.1 billion in annual revenue. The small-molecule arm runs five GMP plants (a GMP plant is a pharmaceutical-manufacturing facility that has been inspected and licensed to operate under Good Manufacturing Practice regulations) covering sterile injectables and solid and semi-solid forms. Polpharma is currently pouring $45 million into expanding its API CDMO capacity, which will be its in-house, GMP-certified contract development and manufacturing lines for complex active pharmaceutical ingredients so it can become the EU’s go-to on-shore supplier of hard-to-make drug actives. On the biologics front, Polpharma Biologics (a sister company under the same shareholder) co-develops biosimilars with partners such as Formycon/Bioeq and STADA: its ranibizumab programme has already secured FDA interchangeability (Cimerli™, 2022) and most recently won approvals in Canada (2023) and Brazil (2025). This drug could be of particular attention to anybody in aging, as it targets age-related macular degeneration. Ranibizumab blocks VEGF-A and is injected intravitreally to halt the leaky, sight-stealing neovascularisation that drives wet age-related macular degeneration, diabetic macular edema and other retinal pathologies. Late-stage ustekinumab and ustekinumab-next-gen projects are moving through EMA and FDA filings, both targeting subunits of interleukins 12 and 23 to treat plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and other autoimmune diseases.

On a fun note, they made their own game that can teach you a lot about the drug manufacturing process. Miasteczko Lekowe (Drug town) is Polpharma’s free, browser-based strategy game that lets players build a miniature drug-manufacturing campus from the ground up adding labs, production lines, warehouses and R&D suites while a realistic process simulator walks them through each chemical, pharmaceutical and quality-control step that turns an idea into a finished medicine, mirroring the workflows in Polpharma’s real GMP plants. I highly recommend to check it out!

Polbionica

Let’s finish this post with one of the most exciting companies for me: Polbionica. They are a Warsaw-based spin-off from the Foundation for Research and Science Development that pioneers 3-D bioprinting of living tissues; their headline project is a fully vascularized “bionic pancreas” printed from a patient’s own cells to restore insulin and glucagon secretion in type 1 diabetes, a world-first prototype achieved in 2019 and now moving toward clinical translation (first transplant is expected in 2026!!). Check out their paper where they share details. Beyond the pancreas, the 150-strong team formulates proprietary dECM-enriched bio-inks and offers scalable printing platforms for organoids, islet niches and other regenerative-medicine applications, positioning itself as a materials-and-technology supplier to the wider tissue-engineering community. Recognition has followed quickly: Life Sciences Review named Polbionica “3-D Bioprinting Solutions Company of the Year 2025,” venture investors have backed its organ-biofabrication roadmap, and a June 2025 agreement with the University of Zielona Góra and the Lubuskie region will add a new R&D hub to accelerate pre-clinical studies. Although they never said that on their website, my aging-research-oriented eye notices the huge potential for replacement strategy with bionic organs - might come sooner than organ cryobanking!

—

Poland’s life-science scene no longer hides behind “emerging” labels. There are antibody design libraries in Wrocław, 3-D-prints vascularised organs in Warsaw, and lobbying Brussels with the same confidence in selling APIs to forty markets. Whether you need a snap-on AI engine (Ardigen), an end-to-end wet lab (Selvita), or a stretch goal as wild as a bionic pancreas (Polbionica), there’s a Polish address that will pick up the phone. So here’s my gentle nudge: the next time you’re scouting partners, start your pin map east of Berlin, and you might find the talent, grit and energy that carried me through Day 1 in Boston and still has me buzzing weeks later.

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What did the experiment look like:

Mostly undergrads, lured by financial incentives, agreed to take part in an experiment that involved writing an essay and having their brain waves measured at the same time (EEG). They repeated the procedure 3 times, over a span of 3 months, and each time had a different essay topic. In 20 minutes, each participant had to write an essay for a variation of a following prompt:

“This prompt is called LOYALTY in the rest of the paper. 1. Many people believe that loyalty whether to an individual, an organization, or a nation means unconditional and unquestioning support no matter what. To these people, the withdrawal of support is by definition a betrayal of loyalty. But doesn't true loyalty sometimes require us to be critical of those we are loyal to? If we see that they are doing something that we believe is wrong, doesn't true loyalty require us to speak up, even if we must be critical?

Assignment: Does true loyalty require unconditional support?” “

As you can see, these essays can be written with no external information. This is creative writing, not a literature review. Of course, you could go in citing all the psychological theories or use historical examples of betrayal of loyalty like Brutus and Caesar, but you don’t have to do that in order to write a well-rounded essay.

The participants were divided into 3 groups:

1. Brain only; write an essay without using any external resources (no google, no book, no chat gpt)

2. Google only - write an essay. The only resource you can use is google and all the websites, but no LLM.

3. LLM only- write an essay. You can only use chat gpt as your information source. No other browsers or search engines are allowed.

I have a concern regarding the LLM-only group; we don’t know and it was not standardized how the participants are supposed to use LLMs. Ask it to generate a full essay in 1 minute and submit, or write your own essay and then ask it to improve? This decision was at full discretion of the participants, and I would argue that it significantly affects the results in a way, that people who just spell checked with chatgpt “used more brain power” compared to people who generated the whole essay.

The experiment was divided into 3 analytic classes: behavioral analysis, EEG and natural language analysis.

Behavioral analysis

After essay submission, each participant was asked the following questions

1. Why did you choose your essay topic?

2. Did you follow any structure to write your essay?

3. How did you go about writing the essay?

4. Search Engine group: Did you visit any specific websites?

5. Can you quote any sentence from your essay without looking at it? If yes, please, provide the quote.

6. Can you summarize the main points or arguments you made in your essay?

7. LLM/Search Engine group: How did you use ChatGPT/internet?

8. LLM/Search Engine group: How much of the essay was ChatGPT's/taken from the internet, and how much was yours?

9. LLM group: If you copied from ChatGPT, was it copy/pasted, or did you edit it afterwards?

10. LLM group: Did you start alone or ask ChatGPT first?

11. Are you satisfied with your essay?

However, I didn’t find answers to some of the questions. This paper is not peer reviewed yet, so if the authors are reading this by any chance, that’s a point to look at before submission.

Of the questions I found the answer to, the ability to quote was the most interesting. When asked to recall a quote from the essay they just submitted, in the first session, only 3 participants in the LLM group could provide one. When asked to provide an exact quote word by word, none of the participants in the LLM group could do it. In the google/brain-only group, only 2-3 participants failed to do so. However in the subsequent sessions, ⅔ of the LLM participants could provide an exact quote. When writing a similar essay a month later, they were tasked and could recall a sentence - that supports the quoting problem that this is an attention issue; these essays were written on very random topics. Since their performance had literally no impact on their further life, I would argue that the LLM group paid less attention to whatever chat gpt was spitting out, compared to the scenario if they had the outcome mattered. I agree that you are less likely to recall a quote from your text if it’s purely AI generated, and you don’t care about the outcome. But if you use it to generate an outcome you care about, eg your resignation letter, I would argue your chances of recalling rise. Nevertheless, I’ve observed in myself that when I use LLMs to write anything (not “take my text and polish it”) and make it “mine” by asking it to tweak it here and there, it’s almost impossible to recall a correct quote, which the paper demonstrated.

EEG: not the brain scans

Let’s start analyzing how the groups performed on an EEG by going into a pet peeve of mine; a lot of articles about this paper claimed that the researchers “had brain scans to prove their results”. EEG does not offer you a brain scan. It measures the electrical activity across your brain, and provides a connection map. The participants wear a bonnet with electrodes, and have a lot of eeg gel on their scalp (which is sooo hard to wash off, trust me).

The superiority of EEG over an fMRI in the context of this study, is that during any other neuroscience research method, movement is strictly prohibited. During EEG, although sudden extensive movements can mess with the results, the participants were able to type and do all the micromovements necessary to analyze the difference in wavelength intensity across groups.

The research included all the wavelengths except for gamma, probably due to too much noise accumulation at that frequency. Before we jump to this, you have to understand one thing: your brain never runs on a single “channel.” Every millisecond it hums with a full spread of all wavelengths: delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma. What changes is their location; for example. Alpha appears at the back when you close your eyes, theta occurs along the midline when you brainstorm, beta intensifies while you move, and so on.

During EEG, the researchers don’t see these bands separately on the raw trace; instead, they digitally filter the signal to isolate each wavelength range and measure how much power sits in that slice. Those bands can also interact: slow theta cycles often “nest” bursts of faster gamma that help lock in memories. Low-frequency waves carry more voltage and dominate scalp recordings, whereas high-frequency gamma is faint and easily buried under muscle twitches. So EEG isn’t a binary read-out of one band; it’s a shifting spectrum whose relative amplitudes, hotspots, and cross-frequency dances reveal which networks are working hardest at any moment.

Alpha

Your brain operates on alpha waves when you’re relaxed, recalling memories, doing a leisure creative task, etc. Interestingly, they are often called “sensory gates.” because they can partially and temporarily lower the ability of other neurons in the area to fire, therefore making it harder for external signals to trigger a response. Kind of like being in the zone.

In this experiment, when students wrote on their own, the “alpha-wave” signals in their brains formed nearly twice as many strong connections (79 vs 42), while those of Chatgpt were far fewer and weaker.Conceptually, the data support the narrower claim that unaided writing invokes broader α-band coordination, but they do not yet settle whether that pattern translates into deeper learning or better creativity.

Interestingly, in the brain-only group, there was a stronger connection between the “visual part of the brain” (occipital lobe) and “main thinking area” (frontal lobe). The authors do not explain why that was the case; potentially because the brain-only writers had to mine their own memories and mental pictures, while ChatGPT users could lean on the tool for ideas and phrasing. However, some participants in the LLM group said that they relied on chatgpt only for structure, but wrote the essay themselves. That’s why I believe the instruction for LLM groups should have been more explicit; narrowing them down asking the participants to not modify a word manually, just prompt until you get an answer, would have yielded more externally valid results. However, this is not how we usually use the LLMs (hopefully), so the researchers could have also limited the number of prompts or ask the users to do max 5 manual modifications, etc.

Beta

Beta waves,responsible for concentration and alertness (math test, doing a lab experiment, keeping something in active memory (“blue flower with red thorns” anyone?) did not show much differences between the LLM or non-LLM groups. Brain-only beta waves stayed a little more tightly in sync than when an AI was helping them. However, the difference was so slight, it cannot suggest that AI is taking all active thinking away from you, contrary to some headlines. Moreover, it could be because the brain-only group had to manually type the entire essay, while the LLM group had AI to type it for them.

Delta

Delta waves are thought to connect large, widely separated brain areas during top-level monitoring, memory integration and internally driven thought. The brain-only group had more delta connections suggesting heavier engagement of these distributed control processes, while AI assistance reduced the need for such widespread, slow-timescale coordination.

Theta

Theta waves occur when the brain is holding several thoughts in mind at once like planning, problem-solving, or switching attention. These waves help distant regions stay in sync long enough to build and update a working plan. In this study, students who wrote without any tool showed much stronger frontal-theta links than those using ChatGPT. Across the whole network, the brain-only group had 78 theta connections, while the chat gpt group had 31. It suggests that composing an essay on your own forces the brain to fetch ideas from memory, juggle wording, and keep track of structure. ChatGPT supplies suggestions on the screen, so writers can off-load part of that mental juggling.

What does it all mean?

Here is a direct quote from the paper, because I think they said it in an excellent way:

“In conclusion, the directed connectivity analysis reveals a clear pattern: writing without assistance increased brain network interactions across multiple frequency bands, engaging higher cognitive load, stronger executive control, and deeper creative processing. Writing with AI assistance, in contrast, reduces overall neural connectivity, and shifts the dynamics of information flow. In practical terms, a LLM might free up mental resources and make the task feel easier, yet the brain of the user of the LLM might not go as deeply into the rich associative processes that unassisted creative writing entails”

So, put simply, when you don’t use any tools, your brain seems to be connecting more regions, because you need to juggle many tasks at the same time: conceptualizing, wording, grammar, information and memory retrieval, typing, etc. When you use a search engine, or LLM you take one or more things off your plate. However, as the paper correctly identifies but mass media misinterpret, this does NOT make you dumb. It frees up the mental availability for other tasks, more of executive nature.

Yes, your brain shows less intense wavelengths during writing, but it doesn’t mean a bad thing for humanity. Brain-only also outperformed the google-only group; the researchers noticed that both groups used their brains differently; “googlers” relied on memory retrieval and visual integration (alpha and beta) while “LLM-ers” showed more connectivity in planning, cognitive processing and showed higher internal coherence across regions (theta and delta). But do we say that access to Google made us dumber? On the contrary, based on development indexes and many other metrics, access to search engines and getting information instantly drastically increased our intellectual capacity (however, I found a paper from last year saying that Google is making everything beter, but our intelligence and creativity. But remeber, correlation is not cuasation). For example, by spending 3 days looking up a specific thing in a library (driving there, fetching the book, writing it down) you can spend significantly less time doing it and proceed directly to your source idea. Why shouldn’t we expect the same benefit for the LLMs?

AI brutally taken away; what happened?

The most interesting part of the paper for me, was when the researchers tested what happened to the brain activity, when they invited the students that wrote 3 essays only with LLMs to session number 4, where they asked them to write one in the brain-only condition. This is especially important given our growing reliance on AI - I don’t remember the last day I didn’t use it at least once. What would happen during a glitch, where all the LLMs would be unresponsive (note that the probability of that without simultaneously crashing the entire internet is very low, and that poses a way bigger question but bear through this hypothetical scenario with me). To understand what happened when AI was taken away, let’s take a second to go over how learning works, demonstrated by all three experimental sessions of the brain-only category:

During the first experiment,the brain exhibited weak connectivity across all wavelengths. In session 2, when they were familiar with the nature of the prompt and experiment, the connectivity in delta, theta and alpha waves drastically increased suggesting more intense recalling memories, attention, and top-down organization. By Session 3, however, all connections but delta (the connector) decreased, but still remained higher than session 1. This suggests that higher-order working-memory and fine-tuning processes, like losing the connections that did not prove useful over time. The three sessions beautifully demonstrated how the brain learns. This is building a skill. So what happened to people, who were also being a skill, but always with AI? And had it suddenly taken away? The connectivity across alpha and beta waves was lower than in session 3, but higher than in session 1. This suggests that the participants built a skill even when using LLMs, but the reliance was heavy enough that they were not able to reach their fully mastery level without AI. The authors suggest that it might be because of reduced cognitive load when AI was present; the participants did not have to think about transition sentences, logical order of thoughts etc, and now, they had to. They suggest that consistent with previous research, relying on LLMs often prevents us from deeply engaging with the task, and makes us more “immune” to building the skill that we could be without the AI presence. Again, quoting from the paper “Session 4 participants might not have been leveraging their full cognitive capacity for analytical and generative aspects of writing, potentially because they had grown accustomed to AI support”. Now, this sounds scary. They also claim that frequent AI use makes us worse at brainstorming and novel idea generation, which I am 100% not surprised about, because I’ve noticed it in myself. However, it is not a problem exclusive to AI - when you have people around you who constantly bombard you with ideas, you could be less incentivized to come up with your own.

Take home message

The original paper is a very good piece of research; it uses diverse analytical methods, is written in a way worthy of MIT faculty, and provides very well thought through interpretation of the results. It went viral, and became virally misinterpreted. It has never said that chat gpt makes us dumber; it said that chatgpt took over some of the tasks from our brains, that we could use for other intents and purposes. Is it very externally valid? I don’t think so. Since the criterion of the LLM use was very broad, I would like to see similar research being performed in other contexts like brainstorming, math, or language learning. Let’s face it, the paper used creative writing as a proxy, and who of us actually does creative writing after graduating high school/collage? I would place my bet on the fact that creative writing skill is already atrophied, with or without chat gpt. Nevertheless, based on this paper, I have some points that I will implement to my AI use:

1. Before you prompt AI to write something for you, try thinking about it yourself for at least 5 minutes. What are your initial ideas? How does the prompt make you feel? Give yourself a chance to think of something new.

2. Once in a while, try writing something without AI at all. Doesn’t have to be incredibly advanced; could be about your favorite restaurant. Your brain might be “surprised” that you try to recover some of its connections you left in 12th grade.

3. Before you send/submit anything you worked with AI on, READ IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT. Not just to check for BS, but ask yourself, does this send the message I want to send? Are there any areas that suggest I didn’t engage with the task deeply enough? Will I be able to remember at least one sentence from it tomorrow?

Ultimately, the points above apply only if you care enough about the output. AI is your friend, and can be your ultimate dream collaborator, if you treat it like one, not like a 24/7 free workforce with no human rights. And I don’t mean saying please or thank you (although it wouldn’t hurt), but questioning it, engaging with it while writing as if you were to write an essay with your PI. You wouldn’t come with no ideas, would you? You wouldn’t say “yeah, right” to whatever they said? At least I hope not. Give your brain a chance to think. Every new cognitive aid sparks the “are we getting dumber?” debate. Calculators didn’t erase arithmetic; GPS didn’t delate spatial navigation in known places. They shifted which skills stayed manual and which became supervisory. Your goal is to stay in the supervisory tier. Because technological shocks rarely hit everyone equally, the safest bet is to engage actively: let AI accelerate your ideas, but keep enough mental skin in the game that the next disruption lifts you rather than leaves you behind.

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Longevity Clinics

PureHealth:

I was familiar with the company from the Forbes Middle East Healthcare Leaders summit, where PureHealth's CEO Shaista Asif was on the panel with Dr Evelyne Bischof (who is the head of our Longevity Education hub; free, accredited longevity medicine courses). However, at that time I did not realize that PureHealth is the UAE’s largest integrated healthcare network, really focused on longevity. I will risk saying that among massive providers globally, they might be the most committed to longevity medicine. I talked to Maitha Ahmed, the head of PR, who emphasized how the location of their main longevity clinic in Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City, the largest medical complex in UAE, strategically places them as “open to everyone” following their mission of democratizing longevity. PureHealth was tucked away inside the large UAE pavilion, clearly relying more on pre-scheduled meetings than walk-by discovery. If I hadn’t known about them in advance, I would’ve completely missed that they’re positioning themselves around healthy longevity.

PureHealth is a publicly traded company listed at the UAE stock exchange at 2.44 aed per share (0.66 usd). They were recently listed as one of the 100 Listed companies in UAE: now that’s a step for longevity medicine.

Bioaro and Biongevity

Biongevity is a longevity clinic in Dubai. I had the honor of meeting Dr Kapoor, BioAro group founder, who shared with me that their longevity supplement “Longevity+” just got certified by the Dubai government, thereby becoming the first UAE’s official longevity supplement. The clinic offers whole geome and exome sequencing, telomere length measurement, gut and skin microbiome analysis, pharmacogenetic testing (which I applaud because I think it’s severely underhyped) and general biomarker analysis followed up by physician consultation. They also have a separate branch BioSport, for maximizing athletes’ health and performance, and soon they will open BioMind, for AI-powered mental health support. They seem to be especially focused and skilled in genetic analysis, so if you’re looking for a trustworthy provider in Dubai, that’s your place!

Wearables and supplements

Activinsights

Attention longevity clinics! This FDA cleared, UK-based company sells raw data accelerometers, which is an alternative to making your patients buy a fitbit. They can track exactly the type of wearable data you want, and you will finally know if your patients actually adhere to their longevity protocol, or just claim they do. Think of all the behavioral studies it could inform! Their device was already used in over 200 clinical trials, and 1500 publications, but the longevity space of their application is still waiting to be filled. They can track over 150 digital biomarkers including acceleration, physical activity intensity, sedentary vs movement activity, posture changes, sleep / wake time and sleep event characterisation. One of the longevity related trials their device is being used in is “Effects of lifestyle changes in an obese metabolically healthy elderly population (ISRCTN11769612)” or “Establishing a life course cohort for advances in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of sarcopenia (ISRCTN54061440)”. The company has operations in 40 countries and has no software or licensing fees for devices.

In my opinion, the two functions that make them stand out over popular wearables is that their device can be worn on wrist, ankle or waist without compromising on data quality, and that they provide an adherence report with wear-time compliance data. So House MD would be satisfied; everybody lies, but now you can detect, if they do regarding their protocol adherence.

LongevityLab’s Sooo.me

This Lithuanian startup, founded by Erika Paule, MBA, and Šarūnas Paškevičius, PhD, cultivates a variety of mushrooms believed to offer longevity benefits. What sets them apart is their innovative use of bioreactors, rather than traditional farming methods, to grow their fungi. The company is now focused on scaling up production to meet growing demand. Their pharma-grade nutraceutical brand is called Sooo.me and they offer 8 types of their longevity mushroom blends: lean, calm, ace, cellular, focused, immune, energetic, solid. Four of them are pure, single mushroom extracts, four contain known geroprotectors like spermidine, quercetin, fisetin or berberine. Some of the less known active ingredients I found in their blends include Shilajit Mumijo (50mg), which is a plant based resin derived from rocks (phyto-mineral), commonly used in Ayurvedic medicine that is supposed to have antiinflammatory and antioxidant properties, or Japanese knotweed: an ingredient from traditional Chinese medicine that contains high amounts of trans-resveratrol; SOOO.me sells it under their “solid” nutraceutical, 350mg per capsule.

I appreciate that they make an effort to measure the purity of their active ingredients, like they did for transresveratrol with HPLC. I would also highly recommend them to test their Shilajit for heavy metals. Depending on the blend of your choosing, the price per box is between 36 to 76 euro.

Caregen

Here comes a supplement with validated with a 12 week human clinical trial. Myoki, Muscle252, the korean synthetic peptide, increased the muscle mass by 2.52% in sarcopenia patients, which translated to improved results of grip strength and walking speed. On a biomarker profile, it increased IGFF-1 and testosterone, while decreasing catabolic markers like myoglobin or creatinine kinase, all with p value less than 0.05. It is a direct myostatin inhibitor; myostatin is a protein that inhibits muscle growth, and its levels typically increase with age, contributing to age-related muscle loss.

The company claims it is the only FDA registered oral peptide for muscle health. They also claim no side effects, which I find hard to believe, but I also did not find any data suggesting otherwise. It would be great to see several extended trials (and before you come at me, I know they cost a lot;)) especially in healthy volunteers to see if there is any kidney/liver toxicity with prolonged use, and if the benefits plateau after a certain duration of administration. When I was wondering about that, I tried to find the published clinical trial results, but I didn’t find anything on google scholar. However, since this is a Korean company making it’s way to the american market, I will give them the benefit of doubt, and assume that the trial is published in korean journals, while I await response from company’s representatives to send me the entire paper.

Another pne of their peptied that might be relevant to aging sells under the name “ProGsterol”. The active ingredient name is Deglusterol and it’s a synthetic peptide that is supposed to increase adiponectin, upregulate AMPK and downregulate TNFalpha. In their clinical study on type 2 diabeties patients, after 12 weeks they saw a higher than placebo reductions in fasting blood glucose and insulin, homa-IR and hba1c; similarly positive results were observed in prediabetic patients. They have another study to compare he effect of progsterol with metformin, and another one to see combination therapy effects.

While Caregen is rather known for designing their peptides for aesthetic medicine (which theoretically I could also claim to be involved in aging; at least be lowering the subjective/psychological age), I was impressed by the trial results I’ve seen for those two supplements in their booklets. I will update this post when I will recieve the link to the published online version, even if in korean.

10X Precision nutrition

This Florida-based company with over 200 000 customers offers genetic testing and biomarker profiling to create a 400 page report telling you how to eat and how to exercise. I always approach these solutions with caution, because I have not seen enough published data to believe that my genes carry information about my body’s nutritional preferences; I think there is so much more in play: microbiome, the actual active ingredient concentrations in produce, acute health states etc. I am rather in favor of frequent blood biomarker monitoring and adjusting accordingly, preferably with longevity physician guidance. The company also offers IV supplement drips, which are marked as “not advised, as there is not enough evidence” in the longevity medicine protocol. The company doesn’t list the genes they test on their website, but they shared them with me during the conference. A careful look at this gene panel shows that only some of the included genes offer useful insights for nutrition, while many have limited or no practical value in guiding dietary choices.

I would say that there are only two, 100% useful genes that their kit offfers: LCT (lactose intolerance) and CYP1A2 (caffeine and some drugs metabolism). On the other hand, if you had a variant in either, you probably realized that diary or coffee doesn’t serve you, before the test could tell you that.

From the mildly useful ones, only if supported by blood tests, genes like MTHFR, MTR, and MTRR are involved in methylation pathways that process folate and vitamin B12. Variants in these genes may raise homocysteine levels and could point to a need for higher intake or active forms of these B vitamins. VDR variants can slightly alter the way the body responds to vitamin D, which might influence supplementation needs. Genes involved in antioxidant defense like GSTT1, GSTM1, SOD2, and GPX1 may impact the body’s ability to manage oxidative stress, suggesting some people may benefit from higher antioxidant support. Finally, many genes in the panel such as IL1A, IL6, TNFA, IL10, and CRP are tied to inflammation, but their effects are small and inconsistent across studies. They don’t offer reliable guidance for diet unless supported by clinical markers. Other genes like HTRA1, FTO, TCF7L2, and COMT are often included in commercial reports, but they have limited value for nutrition because their effects are either too small or too uncertain. Structural and immune-related genes such as COL1A1, CDH13, and HLA-DQA1/DQB1 are not useful for tailoring nutrition. While genes like APOE and APOA1 are involved in cholesterol metabolism, they are only meaningful when paired with cholesterol blood tests; on their own, they don’t dictate specific dietary changes.

Fortunately, the company also offers blood biomarker testing, but at additional cost, and they rather claim that the genes will tell you everything. So in conclusion, if you want to find out all that, why not do whole genome sequencing and consult with the longevity physician based on your blood biomarkers? Nevertheless, for people who don’t know anything about healthy longevity and just want to be healtheir, it is not the worst place to start, and is certinely a good call, if the results would motivate you to take better care for yourself. But do you actually need to pay all this money just to choose healthier foods and exercise more?

MollinQ

This korean company designed a new, resveratrol derived molecule. They are still in early stages, but composed a 4-phase plan of molecule’s application: cosmetics ->clincial dermatology -> menopause symptom relase ->longevity supplemets. Their molecule holds a US patent.

Dual purpose AI drug discovery

Insilico Medicine

There is so much to write about Insilico Medicine that I don’t know where to start. If you have not read their latest Nature Medicine paper showing the positive phase 2a results of the world’s first AI-developed drug, you are clearly missing out and are not keeping up with the latest news in biotech. Their TNIK-inhibitor, Rentosertib, not only increased forced vital capacity in IPF patients, but also decreased the biological age by 2-3 years measured by multiple proteomics clocks.

The good news is not stopping, as they recently oversubscribed their series E raising over 123 million USD, completed phase 1 dosing of MAT2A inhibitor for solid tumors, launched a new component of their Pharma.AI platform, all within the last 2 weeks!

As a natural result, their representatives at BIO were fully booked with meetings and the booth was overflowing with interest. The CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, spoke at multiple panels. His and his team's dedication to fulfilling the company's mission of extending productive longevity for all, was vibrantly present in each interaction with Insilico.

Bioage Labs

There comes another connection from ARDD! Kristen Fortney, the CEO of Bioage Labs was on multiple panels. BioageLabs recently had a lot of good news such as expanding their discovery platform by data from Norway’s HUNT Biobank - one of Europe's most comprehensive population health studies or that their once-daily oral NLRP3 inhibitor has completed IND-enabling studies and is advancing toward the clinic, with Phase 1 single-ascending-dose data expected by year-end. Wait, that’s not the end! Their team advanced to semifinals of XPrize Healthspan competition! On this wave of success, I can’t wait for Kristen’s talk at the upcoming ARDD. Perhaps we’ll learn something about their drugs in discovery in collarobartion with Lilly or Novartis? Can’t wait!

Ps. Kirsten was one of the co-authors of my latest paper; check it out!

Juvena Therapeutics

I had the pleasure of listening to the talk from Juvena’s CEO Hanadie Yousef at the longevity summit dublin 2024, which I covered for longevity.technology. At BIO, she was on the panel with Kriten Fortney about weight-loss management. Juvena Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company pioneering the development of protein-based therapeutics that restore tissue homeostasis by leveraging a proprietary AI-enabled discovery platform called JuvNET. This platform systematically mines the secretome, the collection of proteins secreted by regenerative stem cells, to identify and engineer novel biologics with pro-regenerative, anti-inflammatory, and metabolic effects. Recently, they secured a multi-target partnership with Eli Lilly in 2025. Fingers crossed!

Rejuvenate Biomed

There comes the ARDD sponsor! Rejuvenate BIO’s booth was within the Belgian pavilion. Although I didn’t manage to catch any representatives between their meetings, I was very happy to see them on site. Rejuvenate Biomed is a longevity AI drug discovery start up who developed two proprietary platforms: CombinAge, an AI-driven tool to predict synergistic drug combinations, and CelegAge, an in vivo system using C. elegans to assess healthspan impact. Their lead candidate, RJx-01, is a novel, orally administered combination drug developed for sarcopenia. Preclinical and Phase 1b clinical studies have shown RJx-01 significantly improves muscle mass, strength, and fatigue resistance, with a strong safety and bioavailability profile, positioning it as a promising first-in-class therapy. They recently dosed the first patient in their phase 2 study on older persons with severe acute exacerbation of COPD

If you want to get to the details of the company’s science, listen to their CSO Evi Mercken speak at ARDD 2023 or CEO Ann Belien at ARDD 2022

Longevity therapeutics

Sen-Jam Pharmaceutical

I was approached by their co-founder and chief clinical officer Jacqueline Iversen, who I had the pleasure of meeting during the last ARDD. They are developing an anti-inflammatory repurposed combination drug. For one which has just which has completed phase 1 clinical trial, they are looking for collaborators specializing in metabolic biomarkers of aging.

Exomass

Hidden deep within the Argentinian pavilion, I owe thanks to the promotional video Exomass played by the coffee stand, that explained how the brian ages. If not for that, I would have missed this promising start-up that uses neural stem cell-derived extracellular vesicles (NSC-EVs) for Parkinson's diseases. Their latest publication in Nature Sceintific Reports shows that NSC-EVs offer strong neuroprotection in Parkinson’s disease cell models by enhancing dopaminergic neuron survival and reducing oxidative stress. They are about to publish the in-vivo results in rats, and I hope they wouldl test their treatment on healthy aged mice too, perhaps following the protocol form our latest paper).

On a side note, while writing this article down I relaized that Gustavo Carrizo, the inspiring BD executive for Exomass and PhD candidate in immunology at Johns Hopkins, is a part of Nucleate - a PhD student led organisation supporting student biotech entrepherneurship, with advosiors such as Geoge Church, who I had honor of meerting at the Hravard China Forum earlier this year. Check them out!

Rejuventaion Technologies Inc

This California based company has a great mission statement: Transforming medicine by rewinding cellular aging clocks. Their objective is targeting shortening telomeres, and they use IPF and other types of fibrosis as models. Their solutions include activating telomerase, followed by proprietary lipid nanoparticle delivery of their drug to target. Their technology is in the pre-IND stage and they are about to raise for series A.

Honorable Mentions

UAE Department of Health - The UAE pavilion had a separated space for the department of health - the name known to everybody in healthy longevity medicine, given that they are the first governmental body to approve a HLM protocol, and implement it across regions clinics. Can’t wait for their next move in longevity.

Harry Robb - I had a serendipitous pleasure of bumping into Harry Robb, who helped build Longevity.Technology and now is a VC in Lifespan Vision Ventures. Harry was so kind as to direct my attention to some of the companies at BIO that could interest me, when I was losing hope for minding more than 3 longevity companies at BIO (honestly, big pharma and national pavilions took all the attention and almost all space;)). We met at ARDD; here comes a conclusion from this story- go to conferences and make good connections, because you never know when you will get an unexpected helping hand!

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That would be it from what I found at BIO in longevity. If you’ve been at BIO and you noticed something that I didn’t, please reach out and let me know! I go to many conferences, 80% are dedicated purely to aging research, and i admit I enjoy them a lot more than the non-aging-focused. However, BIO will definitely become my favoirte of the “other” conferences I visited so far (is it because it had at least some aging component? Shhh, nobody’s gonna know;)).

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